What does "opimize your website" mean? What does it do for you? Why should you do it? How do you do it?

All very good questions.

Optimizing your website helps you to acquire high natural rankings in the big search engines on the Internet like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Natural listing are the free listings that generally appear on the left side of your screen when you do a search using an Internet search site (as opposed to the listings on the right side of the page which advertisers pay to get - see PPC Advertising). The value of this is that you can get extra traffic to your website for free because folks searching for items relevant to the content on your website are likely to see your site listed in their search results. If your listing appeals to them, they'll click on it and go to your site to get their question answered.

Sounds pretty good, huh?

The technical term for this process is Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

To optimize your website for high natural search listings...

When optimizing any given page of your site, there are two types of factors considered by the search engines. The first are called "on the page" factors and include items such as the title of your page, the actual content of the page (the text), links on the page leading to other pages, and more technical aspects such as keyword density and location and metatags. "On the page" factors are factors you can control fairly easily and adjust as needed. Don't worry too much about the technical jargon here. There are plenty of resources to help you understand what these terms mean and how to set them for best results.

The second type of factors are "off the page" factors. These include items such as links to your page from other websites and the quality of those links. "Off the page" factors are generally more difficult for you to control which is why search engines like them. These factors are considerably more difficult to fake. None the less, with the right strategy, they can be optimized as well.

Now that you know the basics of SEO, the next step is to learn how to optimize your website. Check out the resources listed in the Optimize Your Website option from the Recommendations menu.

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