What’s more important? Creating sites for users or the engines? The answer is both.

Your favorite thing about having a blog may soon be this – they naturally attract search engine traffic. Blogs already have optimized site architecture. Most are set up with a clear navigation, where every page is set up to link back to the other main pages. They also have the inherent potential to be well-linked.

Primarily a site should be designed for the user, with search engines in mind. Google tends to talk out both sides of their mouth when they say, “Don’t do anything special for the engines”. Yet, they create a webmaster tool center where you can submit a sitemap, and get information about how the engines see your site, errors and what key phrases your site ranks for. That gives new site owners a little bit of confusion.

I like sites that are easy to navigate, pleasing to the eye and that help sell whatever it is you need to. Pages should be set up as landing pages. The great thing about your blog is that it can get so well-indexed that you have the potential to show up for any number of four word phrases that are relevant to your industry. This way you can give the visitor everything they need to make a purchase or fill out a form. At the same time you can optimize these pages for the engines and use the pages for your PPC campaigns. I believe in doing sites this way. It brings the visitor a much better experience.

The perfect site is not only user friendly, but optimized for the engines. You need to target where people go to in order to provide them with the information or product they need. There is nothing worse than having people landing on a page that is optimized for a phrase but offers no information about it… It brings the user a bad experience and you a missed sale or lead. You have a choice. You can target a general high traffic keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic. Once you have a page optimized, you can streamline the transition from viewing what you have to offer to facilitate a purchase. You can also provide related content and links. This, in turn, will help with you PPC because Google is now checking to see how relevant your landing pages are to the keywords you buy.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Sometimes a site’s structure (the relationships between its content) must be altered too. Because of this it is, from a client’s perspective, always better to incorporate Search Engine Optimization when a website is being developed than to try and retroactively apply it.Make a good quality site that will attract natural links to it in order to obtain any form of long term presence within the search engine results page.Make a good quality site that will attract natural links to it in order to obtain any form of long term presence within the search engine results page.

When search engine optimization is successful, it can result in laser targeted traffic from visitors that are looking to spend money. It is partly because search engine optimization is so effective, that it is difficult to achieve good rankings and keep them. Depending on the keywords that you are targeting, you could have millions of other webmasters competing against you for top rankings. This is why you must know what you are doing and choose the right keywords to target.

When it comes to web optimization, you can take on the job yourself, or pay someone to do it for you. While it might be faster and much easier to hand off the chore to someone else, you will want to make sure that you at least have a basic knowledge of the process. There are people and companies on the internet that will charge you thousands of dollars for things that you can do yourself. They will also speak to you with fancy words to justify their prices. If you can filter through the junk, you will be able to determine if you are getting worked over. Besides, you will find that the process isn’t terribly difficult, it is just time consuming. If you understand how to optimize your website, you can outsource some of the more boring tasks and do the ones that you find more fulfilling yourself. It will save you both time, money and put you in control of the entire process.

If you know very little about search engine optimization, keep reading, we will discuss the basics.

1. On-Page Optimization: Even though on-page optimization isn’t as powerful as it once was, it is still necessary. If your site doesn’t include keywords in strategic places, your link building efforts won’t be as effective. Be sure to include your keyword and related ones in your H1, meta, title and description tags. Also be sure to use 1-2 in the first and last paragraphs of your copy and sprinkle it in a few times throughout. Don’t go overboard. Keyword spamming may nullify your efforts.

1. Link Building: Getting incoming links to your website is probably the most important part of search engine optimization. However, you don’t just want any links. You want quality links from well respected websites. Look to add links from top article directories, social networking sites, .edu sites, popular forums and other webmaster’s sites.

1. Adding Content: The search engines reward sites that are growing. Be sure to continually add content to your site. This not only helps you get better rankings, but it also gives you more opportunities to make money.

As you see, search engine optimization isn’t difficult. It is pretty formulaic. The problem is that the formula changes every few years (the search engine don’t like to be manipulated) and that it can be time consuming to get your site to rank well and maintain it’s rankings. It is important to keep up with the changes and to properly optimize your site. Again, this is a job that you can do yourself or you can pay someone to do it for you. Before shelling out the cash, be sure to research various companies. Ask to see proof and for the contact information and websites of people that they have worked with. You don’t want to spend thousands of dollars and not get any results.