Several years ago, when I created my first website, the term search engine optimisation and its acronym SEO really confused me!  I spent long hours trying to figure out just what was meant by SEO and the term ‘keyword rich’ so that my  website would appear higher up on the Google rankings and I spent a lot of time reading equally confusing documents about the subject that I found on the internet.

And it wasn’t until very recently that I realised that SEO is actually incredibly straight forward and not nearly as complicated as I thought it was. Better still, you don’t need to be an expert on the subject (or hire one!) to get your blog or website found by the search engines. This is why I wanted to produce something on Search Engine optimisation – what it is and why you need it – that is concise and to the point.

Put simply, SEO is the way in which you can improve how people find your webpage or blog when they are searching for  information on the internet.

So, what do you do when you want to find information on the internet?

You type a question or a few words in as a search on for example Google or Yahoo; these words are your ‘keywords’.

In order for you to get your webpage or blog found by the search engines, you therefore need to be using words that your potential audience will type in when searching for information; again, these will be your ‘keywords’.

In the case of a blog post, for example, the blog title should contain your keywords i.e. the words that your potential audience will type in when doing an internet search.  You should then repeat your keywords in the first sentence of your article and again at various points throughout where relevant.  The more times your keyword appears on a page, the  higher your rankings. But be warned, this does not mean that you can load your page with keywords and try to fool the search engine. Search engines are amazingly clever and they can tell if you are overloading a page with keywords so be sure to only used them where necessary to make your page easier to read.

But short of guessing, how do you know what words your potential audience is typing in to the search engines so that you can then use them on your website or blog?

I’d like to recommend a great tool that can help you with this, https://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

In fact, if you feel you are ready to find out even more about search engine optimization, I recommend that you click over to http://www.wordtracker.com where you will find lots of in-depth and useful information to help you get your website higher up the search engine rankings.

If you know of someone who is struggling with search engine optimization, please feel free to share this article!