Everyone has used a search engine at least once in their life. Some of us even use them several times a day for our daily internet usage. All major internet companies have them in their sites. And most blog sites have search engines in their own blogs too.  Just type in a keyword for a product or service, or any person, company or anything you might be looking for then hit enter to display search results for that keyword. Because of its ease of use and the convenience it brings, we rely on it ever so often.  Though we don’t realize it, companies work hard and spend money for Search Engine Optimization, just so they maintain a good page ranking and show up at the top of search engines. How can you do this? 

First of all, you have to submit your website in the major search engines like Google and Yahoo. This will allow your website to be placed in their database. But to show up on top of the list, it takes a lot of hard work. And once you reach the top position, you need to work some more to maintain that position.  This is called Search Engine Optimization. People overlook this sometimes and forget the importance of SEO after creating a website. Studies show that over 60% of users follow the links on the first page of their search results. Without SEO, a regular website will not show up on the first few pages, but would most likely get lost in the pool of sites. 

The most basic thing you can do to make your website appear on top is to produce valuable and relevant content, containing keywords that any person would normally use when searching. Placing keywords in the website and the percentage of times it appears on a page relative to the total number of words in that page is called keyword density. Keyword density is one of the things that are used by Search Engines to determine the relevance of that page specific to the keyword. 

Another useful SEO technique is link building, which is creating reciprocal links at e-zines, newsletters and directories, as well as identifying and swapping links with potential partners relevant to the website in question to direct potential customers to your website. Link building not only increases traffic to your website, customers will view it as a valuable resource and your web page will have a wider exposure and it will even get indexed by search engines.  

These are just a few of the SEO techniques that will help increase traffic to your website and widen your business contacts. Search Engine Optimization requires a lot of time and hard work and a continuous process that should not be taken for granted. It might be months before you see some improvement in your page rank, but once you see your page on top of a search results page, you’ll feel like your hard work has paid off.