SEO is the name for the adjustments and additions you do to make your web site more attractive to search engines. Search engines use algorithms to decide how relevant and important a page is, using factors like the pages content, URL, meta tages, site history, and inbound links. The search engines decision determines how high up the search engine result page your web page appears when someone searches for a relevant keyword. A page that ranks well according to appropriate principles is called "SEO friendly." Most browsers do not look past the first page or two of results, so it is absolutely essential to your web sites success to get into the top ten or twenty results for the keywords most important to your site.
How do you use SEO to rise higher in the search results? First, you decide which keywords you plan to compete for. Ranking well for a general term like "coffee" is everyones dream, but almost impossible to do; you will probably find that the more specific the keywords, the easier it is to rank well. "Coffee beans" is a more specific keyword, but "Blue Mountain coffee beans" is better, and "roasted Blue Mountain coffee beans" is excellent. When competition is too high, you may need to use an even longer keyword phrase, like "roasted Blue Mountain coffee beans mail order."
Once you have a list of keywords, retool each page to target one keyword apiece. The keyword should appear in the pages title, description meta tag, and file name. (Ignore the keyword meta tag, which was so heavily abused that it is now irrelevant to SEO.) Any anchor text that points to the page should also include the keyword, and the main content on the page itself should repeat the keyword a certain number of times. The optimum number of times a keyword should be repeated in the body of the page is one of the more delicate parts of good SEO; search engines alter their algorithms frequently to weed out spam, so one month the most SEO friendly keyword weight is 12%, then it drops to 8%, then the next year the percentage is down to 3%. Read reliable SEO forums and keep up to date on the latest SEO developments to know how often to mention a keyword in each of your web pages.
When you are done with the page content, consider your page design. Is your design code light, or will search engine spiders have to crawl through masses of unfriendly code to get to the content? If the code is now at the top of the page, can you relocate it after the page body? Are pages linked with Javascript and Flash, or do you have plain HTML links to and from each page? Do you have a sitemap that spiders can read?
As you can see, improving your sites SEO is not a mysterious, alchemical process. It is simply a matter of creating search engine friendly content that readers enjoy, and adding a few minor enhancements that are visible only to spiders. Read search engine blogs and spend some time on reliable forums, and soon you will know everything you need to make your site SEO friendly. My Central Articles