Maybe you’ve heard the term SEO tossed out before but never understood what it meant. It does not matter if you are an experienced blogger, or an online newbie, search engine optimization, otherwise known as SEO, can make a huge difference in the amount of traffic your site receives regularly. By using SEO, you can increase your site’s ranking on the major search engines thereby driving free traffic to your site.

The first step in getting a high ranking is making sure you have good content on your site. Simply plopping a long list of keywords at the end of your page just doesn’t cut it any more. You are going to have to take the time to work all those keywords into meaningful content. Your customers and the search engines you want to favor your site are simply not going to accept anything less from you if you want to try and make the first page. This really is a good thing for your site anyway, since visitors will simply click away if they see the telltale signs of a site that is just out for their money.

If you need a section of your website to focus on, take a look at your main page. Both search engines and users will focus on your title and your opening paragraph. If these are not clear and focused than you have little hope of attracting a good ranking or keeping visitors on your site. Make sure that these sections contain your main keyword at least once, and you will want to include several synonyms and minor keywords in this section. This is what tells everyone what your site is about, so make sure it is a good representation of your content.

Once your site is optimized it’s time to start looking for back links. Ideally your site will be so awesome that others will start linking to it without any action by you, but in reality these links are few and far between. There are ways around this, however. The most common is to create a network of sites each linking to each other. You will need to make sure not to make it obvious to the search engine crawler that this is what you are doing though. Alternatively, you can have one high quality site that is your main page, and create others that link back only to it.

When you are working your keywords into your site, be careful of over-saturation. Anything over seven percent of a single keyword is simply too much. This will flag your site with the search engines, and at this point your site just becomes too clunky for viewers to enjoy. This also means that you are not using enough similar keywords to attract a larger audience. Remember that now everyone searches using the exact same terms so you need to work some variety into the keyword you are using on your site.

Now you’re ready to get started optimizing your website. Remember that this takes time- you won’t necessarily see a huge increase in traffic your first day. Give it time, you’ll get there.