What is SEO?: The Basics of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Part 1 of 2

Are you wondering "What is SEO"?

This is one of the most common questions for internet entrepreneurs and although the answer to this question could take up an entire book, or actually a series of books, this article tries to answer the question "what is Search Engine Optimization or SEO?"

SEO involves a series of modifications you can do to your website as well as a long list of things you can do outside of your site to help improve the position of your listings when someone performs a search in the search engines.

After all, that's what the internet game is all about. People search for topics or a solution to a problem in the search engines, and then click on the first few results that seem to offer the answer they are looking for.

The first place to start of course is in your own back yard meaning your website. The purpose of this article is just to give you a few pointers on how to do that.

For you newbies out there, SEO simply means Search Engine Optimization. That means that you want to "Optimize" your pages so that search engines know what your pages are about in order to rank them correctly.

The fact is that SEO is a HUGE subject matter than can take years to learn. One could literally work 8 hours a day just doing SEO for your site if you were really serious about it. That is definitely NOT what I recommend.

I recommend implementing the main SEO strategies which really only take a few minutes per page. The following SEO strategies are ones that have been working for years and continue to work today.

There are two main things to keep in mind when you do SEO.

1) EVERY page on your site can be optimized for its own keywords.

2) You should only target 1 to 3 keywords per page.

The first thing you have to determine is "what" keywords you are going to target with each page. In order to do this, you need to do some keyword research, which is too long a subject for this lesson.

However, the easiest way to get started is to just go to Google and do a search for "Google Keyword Tool" and you will find Google's free keyword tool. This tool will provide for you most of the more popular keyword phrases for your subject matter.

The correct way to pick your target keyword phrases is not necessarily picking the most searched keyword phrases as they may have too much competition for you to compete with.

The correct way is to target the keywords with the most demand AND the least amount of competition. The free Google keyword tool will actually provide you with the search numbers as well as the competition for each keyword, so this is actually quite easy to do.

Then, once you've picked the 1 to 3 keywords you want to target for your page, you want to make sure to insert or include these keywords in the following places on each one of your site's pages:

1) Title Tag - This is the most important of all.

2) Keyword Tag

3) Description Tag

4) Header Tags (These are in your actual headlines in your text)

5) Body Copy

That's really all you need to do to optimize your page for rankings.

Please look for part two of this article "What is SEO Part 2" to find out more suggestions on how to implement your keyword targets in each one of the areas suggested here.