What exactly is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, what this means is you are optimizing your website or blog so you receive traffic from keywords that people use in search engine results. The traffic you receive depends on the keywords you use, so the more keywords you use that your prospect would enter into a search engine the more traffic you will receive.

So the quality and quantity of your visitors depends on the quality of your keywords. If you use keywords that your prospects wont type into a search engine, your website or blog wont be found and in turn you wont make any money. I may sound simple but so many people use keywords that "they" think prospects would use. Everyone is different so what you may think is a great keyword your prospect may choose something completely different and your keyword is completely useless.

What you need is a way to find out what other people in your niche are using and see which keywords are getting the most results. This may sound easy, and it can be if you use the right tools to find out what other people in your niche are using. I will give you details to tools later in this article.

Special Tip Before we continue a word of warning, you may receive huge amounts of traffic from search engines but that can be a waste of time if your website or blog is ill prepared. Make sure your website or blog is ready for the traffic it will receive. This means making sure your website or blog is easy to navigate, so many websites and blogs are to scatted and people do not know where to look first. This is really bad because when prospects loose interest they will close the browser for your website and go find another website.

SEO is very important for your website or blog, having a visually friendly website blog is also very important. Combine the two and you have a winning formula, but miss one out and you will either have an increase in visitors to your website and they leave because your website is "rubbish" or your website/ blog layout is user friendly and packed with tons of useful content, but no one can find you because the keywords you have chosen are not the same ones your prospects have chosen.

Helpful Tools

Spyfu - http://www.spyfu.com

SpyFu, originally GoogSpy, is a search analytics company SpyFu shows the keywords that websites buy on Google AdWords as well as the keywords that websites are showing up for within search results. Use this tool to see what keywords other websites and blogs are using.

Google AdWords: Keyword Tool

This is another cool keyword search tool you enter a keyword, it will then give you
*Competition
*Global Monthly Searches
*Local Monthly Searches
*Local Search Trends.

This is a real time and money saver, it also takes the guess work out of keyword searching.

Yahoo Answers

http://answers.yahoo.com/ Yahoo! Answers is a new way to find and share information. You can ask questions on any topic, get answers from real people. With this tool you can search past question on your chosen niche and look for keywords that keep coming up, this is a strong indicator of what people are typing into search engines.

Final words: Remember the 2 part formula for a successful website, great SEO and a well constructed, user friendly website/ blog.