The Importance of Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a way of getting a good page ranking from an Internet search engine (like Google and Bing) without paying advertising fees to the search engine company. That is, it promotes "organic" search engine results. Studies show that having results on page one of a search are disproportionately decisive in whether a searcher finds your website. Simply stated, the higher your page rank, the more likely you are to be found.
Google, Bing etc all have advertising programs that offer to put your website entry on page one, for a fee that is determined by competing bids from other websites for the same search phrase. Thus, for popular searches, you will find the cost of advertising will mount quickly. SEO focuses on permanent changes you can make to your website so that you can rank high AND avoid those advertising fees. The two most important components are content and backlinks.
ContentYou must deploy excellent content on your website to reap excellent benefits. Search engines will ding misspelled and ungrammatical content, so you must take care to put up well-written material. Your content should make reference, several times, to the search keywords for which you wish to be found. Search engines "crawl" your site, analyzing the words you use in titles, subtitles, captions and text. By emphasizing (within reason) a critical set of keywords, you are telling the crawler how to classify your website. Also, by posting good content on your site, you are more likely to attract visitors who may then leave backlinks from their sites to yours. Remember, keep fresh content coming - new content is rated highly by the search engines.
Backlinks
Backlinks are hypertext links from other sites that point to your site. Search engines like it when you have a large number of quality backlinks, and reward you with a higher page rank. By "quality", I mean backlinks from websites that already have a high page rank - known as "authoritative" sites. The linking websites should contain content that is relevant to yours. Google has grown fussier about unrelated backlinks, so it's best to avoid them. You can check backlinks to your website using an online backlink-checker (BC). The BC should show you who is linked to you and what their page ranks are. You can try to establish backlinks on authoritative sites by leaving linked comments at blogs and forums. You can also hire an SEO company to help you generate and post pages containing backlinks.