Without customers any business will fail. For websites, this translates to interested visitors who will browse the site's offerings and possibly buy now or at a later date. The main way websites are able to attract targeted visitors is through search engine optimization (SEO). SEO refers to strategies you implement to optimize your website pages so that they are search engine friendly. This will allow you to maximize your position on the search pages for certain search terms. This is known as your search engine page rank. The higher your page rank, the more likely it is that searchers will click on your link and visit your website. The reason why everyone with a website should use search engine optimization on their website pages is to generate free search engine traffic to their site. Pay per click advertising can be expensive and is not as effective as the free variety although it can get traffic to your site quickly. A better, longer term strategy is to optimize your site to maximize free traffic that has already shown an interest by searching for related terms. Unfortunately, Google's original formula for calculating page rank was able to be understood and abused by internet marketers who used 'keyword stuffing' to gain a high page rank. This means they overused keywords to fool search engines into giving them a high page rank. A lot of unintelligible content was created on the web at this time and even where the content had some value, it was often written badly to accommodate keywords. It didn't take very long for Google to realise this was going to become a huge problem. If its search engine was to be valued, it had to give users valuable results and filter out the garbage. So it changed its calculations and now a relatively low keyword density is valued and a high keyword density is penalized. Furthermore, Google included the concept of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) in its search engine rule so that synonyms and related expressions on a web page were given value. What this means is that if you want a high page rank, you should write naturally using a range of common descriptions and expressions to explain your information as well as your keywords (kept to a minimum). If you use your keyword (it can be a phrase) in the title, in the first paragraph and the last paragraph as well as in the body of the text so that the total keyword density is no more than one to two percent, you will give yourself an advantage with the search engines. Furthermore, you will not risk a penalty for using your keyword too many times. More than anything, write for your readers. Give them good value and aim to please. As your website becomes more popular, it will grow naturally. You will find other sites gradually linking to you, which will increase your link popularity (another factor in page rank calculations). If you combine common sense SEO practices with valuable, informative content you will improve your page rank gradually and increase the number of interested visitors to your site. More visitors equals more customers. More customers equals more money. That's why search engine optimization is important.
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