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What is SEO?SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a term used to describe techniques used to drive traffic to your website from search engines. Most search engine traffic you get will come from the big three search engines: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. If you want to succeed in marketing your products online, you need to make sure that at least some of your Online marketing efforts are dedicated to SEO. Keywords Most visitors to your site will find you by typing keywords into a search engine. These may be a single word or a phrase. By putting content on your site that contains relevant keywords, you have a better chance of having Web surfers find your site. How Search Engines Work Search engines have programs that go out through the World Wide Web looking at content. These programs are referred to as bots, spiders, or crawlers. Even the most advanced search engine doesn't have every web page crawled yet; according to estimates, only about half of the 20 billion pages online have actually been indexed. Once a particular page has been crawled by a search engine's spiders, it is indexed. Indexing means that the page has been added to that search engine's database. Web crawlers will revisit your pages to see whether they have been updated since the last visit, so it's important to keep feeding your site with fresh content. When you type a search query into a search engine, the process is really quite impressive. The search engine software goes through all of its pages to find a match for the word or phrase you submitted. The more narrow your query, the more specific your results will be. The search results you are given are not just pulled out of the air (figuratively speaking); they are ranked according to a formula known as the search engine's algorithm. The specific factors that a search engine uses to rank sites is a closely-guarded secret; the best anyone has come up with are strategies that seem to work to get a higher ranking. Getting High Rankings and Web Traffic If you want to attract a steady stream of traffic to your site, you need to get a high search engine ranking. SEO techniques will help you to reach that goal by helping you to determine which keywords people are most likely to be using to find information relevant to your niche market. When you make a point of putting out content with these well-chosen keywords in it, you have a better chance of attracting site visitors who are interested in what your site has to offer, and motivated to buy from you - now. A key component of SEO is to track where the traffic coming to your site is coming from and what kinds of keywords Internet users are using to find you. If you can't track your results, you have no idea what techniques you are using that are the most effective, and that is an important aspect of Search Engine Optimization. More information about SEO here.
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