Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Why should I care about SEO?

A friend of mine that recently got into blogging discovered SEO This and came to me full of questions. The first being why didn't I tell her about this blog and second why did I care about SEO? This was promptly followed up with should she care about SEO?

The answer to the first question was a simple one. I didn't tell her about "SEO This" because it is an outward display of my truly geeky inner self. Not that I should care at the ripe old age my "mid-thirties" whether people think I am a geek.

The answer to the second and third questions are also a collectively simple one. Anyone who has an online presence, aside from totally private sites, needs to care about SEO. In order to drive traffic to your site people must be able to find your site. The only way people, aside from the few hits that are referred by others, will find your site is when they conduct and query on a search engine that and the results either bring up links to your site or list your site directly in results. The more links the greater your chances are of being listed among the first in the results for that particular query. Basically a information seeker is only going to plunder through so many listings that are returned on a search query. If your site is not among the first few that come up the chances become much smaller of anyone finding your site. Proper SEO tactics allow search engines to easily index your content as well.

Aside from incoming links it is critical to be choosing your keywords carefully as well. Choosing hot keywords is a great way of making your content search friendly. Links and keywords are two easy SEO strategies that anyone can easily put into action and everyone should care about!

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