by Daniel Xiao Wang

Created on: June 30, 2010

Search engine optimization is the strategy used to help search engines find your website and to encourage them to display your website. A strong search engine optimization strategy can build and generate website traffic and make your on line marketing efforts a success.

Search engine optimization encompasses many areas of website design and content. Through proper use of keywords and link building SEO can help bring people to your site. But first, how do people find your site on line anyway?

Most people come to a new website in one of three ways. The first is that they performed a search through a search engine and were taken to your website. The second is that they were referred to your website by a friend. The third is that they followed a link from another site to your site.

Search engines only work if they can provide people with what they are looking for. So in order to do this they must have a system to determine what is relevant to what someone is searching for. With millions of searches being performed each day, you want your website to appear highly ranked when people search for what you are offering.

In order to decide what is relevant they look at the other ways that people find your website. When people visit your website if they like what they find they will often do two things. They will come back to your website, and they will refer others to your website. Search engines track the number of visitors to your site, old and new, and also the number of links going to your site.

Search engine optimization focuses on these three things. Strong SEO includes having valuable content that people will want to link to and share. Search engine optimization balances the words in the content to make it easier for search engines to find it relevant to what people are searching for. And search engine optimization also seeks to link to, and get linked back from, reputable websites that will weight favorably with search engines.

Being seen as reputable and valuable by search engines will place your website higher in the search engines search results, and more people will be able to access your site when searching for topics relevant to your content. As these people find your content useful they will link to it also, causing search engines to place even more value on your content and increase your rank- drawing yet more traffic.

Search engine optimization is one of the best ways to build and generate website traffic. Having a strong SEO strategy can encourage people to come, and keep traffic flowing to your content.

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