Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Market Your Website With SEO

By Julie Johnson

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is that stuff you do in order to get your website ranked higher by the search engines. If you are a webmaster, you likely are aware of the benefits of SEO, but unless you're deeply engaged in the practice, there may be some important techniques that you are unaware of. Now more than ever, it is important to employ the latest SEO approaches to keep from being a few steps behind.

By developing web content with proper SEO techniques in mind you'll gain more traffic and maximize exposure to your website. This can boost sales or create a customer base like you've never even imagined. But before you start designing your website for SEO, there are a couple of solid techniques to keep in mind.

Because the internet has become so competitive SEO is not as easy as it once was. In the past all a webmaster had to do was throw in a couple of keywords, add some meta tags and they were done. Now, instead of sticking to the method of writing content using a set of specific keywords, you are going to have to get a little bit more aggressive.

Link building is a great strategy for those who are trying to maximize their SEO capabilities; and this process has a couple of benefits. First of all, the major search engine sites analyze any other websites that link to your site, and they also analyze the relevance of these sites as well. If you have several websites that are similar in subject matter all linking back to your site, your search engine rank will improve. On the other hand, if you just have a series of random sites leading back to yours, your ranking is likely to take a hit.

Of course, the ultimate goal of SEO is exposure. Websites need quality exposure in any form they can get it. By having your links placed on pertinent, high quality websites, you are more likely to get noticed and possibly visited by internet surfers. That is what it is all about. - 17943

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