Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is probably the fastest growing segment of the internet marketing world today. It revolves around the principle that if you create sites that are “search engine friendly”, your sites will rank higher in their search results, thus improving the traffic to your site. When done properly, search engine optimization can be a real goldmine, but bad seo techniques can cost you a lot of time and effort. Let me give you a couple of tips that will help you get on the way to becomming a great search engine optimizer.

First of all, you have to understand the importance of keywords. Keywords are what search engines are based on and without good keywords, your search engine optimization efforts are set to fail. The key to efficient search engine optimization is choosing popular keywords that don’t have too much competition. To help you with this task, you will need a good keyword research tool. If you are short on money, Google offers a great free keyword research tool. You can find it at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. However, I suggest you get a paid keyword research tool such as word tracker as soon as possible if you want to get better results.

Once you found a good keyword research tool, you have to choose high volume, low competition keywords. If your site is about acne per example, you’ll probably have a hard time ranking high against the hundreds of thousands of other acne related site on the web. But just by running the word acne through a keyword research tool, you will find out that keyword phrases such as like “topical acne” or “over the counter acne treatment” might stand a better chance…

After you found the right keywords for your site, you’ll have to build your site appropriately. If you have no web programming skills, you’ll have to seek professional help. But if you have some basic html skills, make sure that each of your web pages as a unique Meta tag, html title tag and Meta description. Insert your main keyword or keyword phrase in the beginning of the body of your page and repeat it along the body, BUT KEEP IT ORGANIC. Overuse of keywords if frowned upon by search engines and if you do “keyword stuffing” as they say, your site’s ranking will suffer.  Use different styles such as bold or italic to make your keywords stand out to search engines. However, make sure you don’t overdo it. You shouldn’t use bold or italic more than three times per page. You should also follow the simple header, footer, menu format to make it easier for search engine bots.

Seo consist of a lot more than the couple of tips I just gave you, but that should be more than enough to get you started on the path to becoming a great seo optimizer. Make sure you stay updated as much as possible because search engines are always changing, so are seo tactics.