Search Engine Optimization - Introduction

For all of you fellow bloggers beginning a journey out there here is a brief description of SEO or Search Engine Optimization and why it is so important.

Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN provide Blogs with a great source to generate huge volumes of traffic. There is enormous amounts of traffic to be sourced from search engines.

SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website or in this case a Blog from Search Engines via organic search results. This allows readers to find high quality websites that are discussing products, topics, events etc that the reader wishes to find out about.

SEO is so important because the higher a website ranks, the more visitors it will generate from the Search Engine.

So if you are trying to make money from a blog via adsense or affiliate programmes you really need to nail the SEO side of things. Equally imprtant if you are trying to discuss a topic that you are passionate about, you want and need visitors to your blog so SEO is no less important.

Blogs suit Search Engines and can rank very nicely due to the fact that they are usually updated frequently, targeting "niche" topics, have a interlinking structure and the ability to generate links from other blogs and bloggers etc. There are many ways that blogs can be enhanced effecting where the blog ends up indexed and ranked. These techniques are referred to as Search Engine Optimization (or SEO).

Now I just need to discover how to optimize this Blog for the search engines initially.

What seems to be highlighted over and over again by everyone is that keywords are no longer the be-all and end-all of SEO; nowadays content also plays a crucial role.

I read a post on Problogger by Darren Rowse who recommended Aaron Wall's SEO book as a valuable resource. My aim is to emulate what the successful bloggers out there have done!

I have found that Traffic Travis is a very useful free tool (I personally upgraded to the pro version after trying the free version). You can read about Traffic Travis here.

I will write a number of articles on various forms of SEO as I go along, I will then add a list at the bottom of this page to be easily directed to relevant pages:

SEO Tool pages on this blog:

* Traffic Travis