What Is SEO and How Can It Help My Website's Google Visibility?

Learning how to improve your site's SEO can significantly improve your business' prominence in online search results

What is SEO?

Search engine optimisation or SEO refers to the process of improving the position that your website appears at in the "organic" search results returned by sites such as Google.

As a general rule of thumb, sites that appear higher up in the results will get more traffic to their pages, and so potentially more business. Your goal is to get to page one and ideally to position one, but whether that is feasible largely depends on the market that you are operating in.

Keyword rich content

A useful free tool for identifying your keywords is the Google AdWords keyword tool. This is designed to help prospective advertisers identify the most relevant keywords for their chosen market, but it is also very helpful when writing copy for your website.

Once you have identified your keywords, ensure that they appear in the body of your pages, as well as in the metadata of your page, which is the unseen data that gives the spiders key information about your page. 

Linking

Page Rank is a number scored out of 10 that is given to your website based on inbound and outbound links, and helps search engines to verify how trustworthy your site is. Linking between sites allows "link juice" to be carried through, so if your site is linked to by a site with a good Page Rank, link juice will be carried forward to your site, improving your ranking

Keep it fresh

The rate at which search engine spiders crawl your site is in part determined by how frequently the content of your pages change. With this in mind, you may want to create a monthly task to change text, images, or add or remove pages, in order to ensure that your content is regularly updated.

Keeping up to date with SEO

The algorithms used by Google and Microsoft to determine the order of their results are subject to tweaks and improvements as they attempt to deliver ever more accurate search results. As a result, SEO is something of a moving feast and it pays to stay up to date. That said, these basic principles are unlikely to change significantly as they are key determinants of your ranking.

Source: http://goo.gl/B86Bmc