SEO, or search engine optimization, is how you make your website more appealing to the automated programs that assign it a rank on the results page. If you want to gather potential customers from the search engines, it’s vital to rank as high as you can. Although this sounds like a challenge at first, it’s definitely an achievable goal.

Like a lot of online marketing efforts, SEO is susceptible to starting out with poor focus. You do not need to take this route in your own optimization campaign. Start where every good marketer starts: the audience. Who is using the search engines to find companies, products, and services like yours? Most importantly, what sort of keywords are they using when they search? Consider your own resources, too. Are you capable of competing for the most popular, most general keywords, or do you want to focus on a less competitive niche?

By this point, with a rough idea of the keywords and the potential customers you may be dealing with, you’re ready to take a look at your competition. Finding them is easy; just run a search on your keywords. The sites that show up on the first page are the ones to concentrate on. Take the time to visit them and even look at their source code. Figure out what steps they have taken to garner such interest from the search engines. How much of their optimization is on-site? How much is in their content and their code? How heavily-linked are they to other websites?

With a clear understanding of the behavior of your potential customers and of the other companies going after them, you’re ready to build up a strategy of your own. At the outset, concentrate on remaining focused. Develop a core idea of how you are going to optimize, and focus as much as possible on making all of your efforts contribute to the overall goal. As you progress, it’s a good idea to review your work from time to time in order to ensure that you maintain this focus.

Once your SEO strategy is set, it can be a good idea to set it aside for a little while. Optimization will play a big role in how your website is put together, but it should not be your first concern. When you construct your site, you should be concentrating on the experience for the end user. You want visitors to find your site rewarding, straightforward, and easy to use. You can worry about maximizing its search engine performance after you have made it the sort of site people would actually want to visit.

Finally, remember to maintain a certain level of SEO awareness even once your site is up and running. Additions, changes, and new features should receive some optimization attention. It’s also very important to periodically review the performance of your chosen keywords. Keyword popularity changes all the time, and you may want to shift your focus to new terms in order to remain relevant.

If you follow this article’s advice when you lay out your website’s optimization plan, you should find yourself with some very solid groundwork. SEO is a big field and a fast-changing one; remember to keep looking for more material with which to educate yourself.