SEO is one of those terms you've certainly heard in connection with websites and internet marketing, but what does it really mean? Why is SEO important? And how would comprehending it improve your business?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it involves optimising web pages in order to improve their performance in search engines. Each time you do a search on a subject, the search engine parses its directory and returns a list of related sites. These sites are sorted by significance and relevance in the hope that the first site or two that appear will provide you with the information you want.

Thus, search engine optimization is really about structuring your web pages in such a way that search engines understand precisely what information they include. However, why is SEO required?

It's fairly simple - there are millions upon millions of web pages, and you must do all possible to ensure that search engines understand precisely what your sites are about and include them in the list they offer. It's a well-known fact that consumers seldom go beyond the first page of search results and are more likely to click on the first three results, so you need to ensure that your website is on the first page in order to be viewed. It makes no difference how wonderful your website appears; if you haven't optimised it properly, you will never be discovered.

The secret is to determine the primary topic of each page and then to consider what people would put in if they were doing a search on that subject. These words will become your keywords, and they will serve as a guide for search engines as to the subject of your website. Careful usage of such keywords in the appropriate number and locations on the website will assist search engines in deciphering the page's content and include it in the list of results they return.

However, it is not as simple as it seems. It's really fairly tough to strike the proper balance. You must include sufficient keywords to inform search engines about the content of your page, but you must also ensure that your text reads properly, since it is ultimately humans that visit your site, not machines!

However, SEO is more than keywords, and there are more strategies to boost your website's SEO. The quantity of inbound links to your site - that is, where other people connect to you - is one of the elements that search engines consider. Both the amount and quality of external links contribute to your site's search engine ranking. Article submission is another essential technique in the SEO armoury, but determining where to submit articles is not always straightforward, since not all article directories are created equal. Blogging is an excellent approach to boost your search engine optimization, both by allowing you to include highly targeted keywords in your articles and by rapidly growing the size of your website. And, although meta information is less crucial to Google these days, it is still vital to ensure that your meta tags match your keywords and the page content.