Any great website can elicit feelings or actions and become easy to remember, but you first have to generate the initial traffic for it to become successful. A strategy that I have recently found utilizes the vast amounts of traffic through search engines. Making your website optimized for any search engine can greatly enhance it’s success.

I want to share some important points about SEO, why it’s important, ways you can optimize your site, and how to measure success. I will be unable to cover the broad topic of SEO, however I will give you a general idea on how it can generate traffic to your site.

SEO builds trust and creates opportunity.
By optimizing for search engines, your website has the opportunity to gain traffic and, more importantly, trust.  A search engine will list results of a search query after a user enters in a keyword or phrase. If your site appears within the top three (or in that general area) of results, you have a greater chance of gaining the users trust, which is then followed by a visit.

Search engines offer huge opportunities for generating traffic. The image below demonstrates that Internet users want quick answers and are only willing to dig as far as the top results.

Users are always looking at the top results.

Why is this important?
SEO is important because gives your site access to huge amounts of online traffic that use search engines as a navigation tool for the Internet.

“Americans conducted 15.5 billion searches in April 2010, up slightly from March. Google Sites accounted for 10 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.8 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.8 billion), Ask Network (574 million) and AOL LLC (371 million).” – SEO MOZ

Clearly, search engines have a desirable audience. To take initiative of this opportunity, you must optimize your site.

The best ways to optimize your site for search engines.
Each search engine has a list of best practices for optimization. The lion’s share of search queries belongs to Google, followed by Yahoo and Bing, all of which you should strive to be listed on.

Here are some other SEO links to tools that can help you get going on your site’s optimization (keep in mind there are hundreds out there):

SEO Browser-displays your website in the eyes of a search engine crawler (a robot that index’s the web). It is helpful to understand how a search engine works and see what changes you can make to increase the visibility of your site.

Here is an example of the SEO browser tool at work:

CNN.com

CNN.com to a search engine.

The purpose of this tool is to compare the content and make sure the search engines are viewing the same information as you are.

Term extractor-shows your websites major keywords. If your site is displayed on a search engines results, its most likely from one of these keywords.

Rank Checker-ranks your site as to how well it is relevant to the keyword’s you wish. For example, if you want to have an online store with shoes, Rank checker will rank your site on the keyword “shoes”.

Was your optimization successful?
One of the best (free) ways to find out if your optimization was successful is to install a free Google Analytics account. This account will not only give you insight on your incoming traffic, but it will also help you gauge success. Through the Analytics account, you can view your direct, referral and search engine traffic. These incoming sources can help you determine whether your site is getting optimal traffic from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Analytics can also help you discover which keyword terms users are searching to get to your site. Knowing this valuable data will help you understand possible ways to improve your site and keep users coming back.

Overall, SEO is a worthwhile investment. Optimizing helps promote traffic and increase your sites trust.

“As marketers, the Internet as a whole and search, specially, are undoubtedly one of the best and most important ways to reach consumers and build a business, no matter the size, reach or focus” – SEO MOZ

To read more about improving your sites success, here is a great beginners guide to search engine optimization.