Search engine optimization or (SEO) is the process of optimizing web pages to achieve better search engine ranking. Good search engine ranking is important because it's the best way to drive relevant traffic to your website. And relevant traffic will ultimately lead to more leads and more customers for your business. In this article I'll cover the basic things you'll need to know in order to get started optimizing your pages for better ranking.

Keywords

All good search engine optimization starts with keyword research. As a website and business owner you'll need to know which keywords your potential customers are likely to type into search engines when searching for products and services like yours. Hopefully you already have an idea of what someone might type into a search engine but if you need more help Google makes a keyword search tool that will help you target the most relevant and popular keywords. You can find the Google keyword search tool by going to Google.com and searching for "keyword search tool".

Page Title

Your page title should be compelling text that help people know what your website is all about in a glance. Your page title are the words which show up in your browser tab. But even more importantly they're the words that will appear in bold, blue, and underline when someone finds your site in Google's search results. Therefore you must include your most targeted keywords in your page title and display them in a way that's liking to make someone want to click on your search result.

Page Name

Your page name is the name of your actual web page file. You should try to include your target keywords in your page names with dashes separating each word. For  example: my-web-page-name.html.

Headline

The heading is the text displayed at or near the top of your pages. Google and other search engines know that a well written web page will include a  headline across the top of the page telling the visitors what the page is about. It's a good practice to put your targeted keywords in a headline near the top of your page, in a larger font, and in bold.

Content

Make sure every page you optimize has plenty of great text content. Avoid using images to display words. Search engines cannot read them and therefore they do nothing to help your ranking. Instead use text and be sure to populate your content with your keywords. Just make sure you keep your content sounding natural and not contrived.

Backlinks

Backlinks are the single most important thing when it comes to search engine optimization. If you don't have a link coming from another ranked website to your website the only way  a search engine will ever know you exist is if you manually submit your website to them. Backlinks are hard to come by. Google know this and that's why it's the backbone of their ranking system. It only takes one backlink from a very popular site to skyrocket your search ranking.

Stay tuned all this week as I go in depth on search engine optimization and don't forget you can build a free website (that's search engine friendly) at WebStarts.com