SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a major strategy used by internet marketers to promote their websites or online pages in order to drive more visitors to their sites. Search engine optimization involves improving the quantity and quality of site traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. SEO targets free traffic as well as paying traffic instead of direct visitor traffic or organic traffic. SEO therefore, aims to bring more visitors to the site thereby bringing more business.

An excellent way of measuring the success of your seo efforts is to keep track of the number of visitors who land on your website from search engine results. It can be very useful to know the exact position of your keywords in the SERPs (search engine results page) after making SEO efforts. The number of visitors who come directly from organic search is also helpful to analyze seo efforts. This is because people who browse for information like products and services are more likely to buy from that specific website rather than visiting other ones. For example, if you were selling an article on yoga, then it is quite possible that a casual browse through the search results might bring about the presence of some relevant keywords but it’s unlikely that those keywords would be one of the top three results.

In order to benefit from seo efforts, it is important to keep a tab on the things like website rankings, the number of incoming links, the organic traffic and the keyword rankings. A good SEO analyst keeps a regular track of all these things. Keyword ranking is an important aspect of SEO, because a higher rank in a SERP means better chances of attracting traffic to the site. In fact, a site that does not feature in the top ten results for a particular keyphrase may never show up at all.

In order to improve the rankings in the search engines, an SEO analyst has to be well versed with the algorithms and the functionality of the search engines themselves. This is one of the most effective ways of attracting more visitors and converting them into paying customers. Another thing to note is that the major search engines often incorporate the use of SEO in their ranking algorithm. If they do so, then it is highly likely that your site will get a rank.

Keywords in seo efforts play a crucial role in attracting traffic as they determine which sites should be ranked higher and which ones have to face a drop in their page rankings. Apart from that, the use of links is another way of attracting more visitors. There is a widely spread misconception that the use of links is only required once; it is not necessarily true. While search engines do consider the existence of links in their calculations, they also take into consideration the existence of blue widgets in the site as well.

Blue widgets are a way of indicating that your website is relevant to the keyword research done by the search engines. This is one of the major factor that determines the ranking factors of the site. If the keywords being used in the SEO efforts are related to financial matters, then chances of getting higher rankings would be minimal. On the other hand, if the keywords being used are about general topics or human interests, then chances of getting high rankings would be high. These two examples clearly demonstrate that keyword research plays an important role in seo efforts.

Today, many SEO firms provide their clients with a number of additional resources apart from seo services. These additional resources are usually provided for free of cost but may sometimes, come with little or no benefit. It is therefore important to keep in mind that these additional resources like backlink analysis tool, analytics and RSS counter are all part and parcel of seo rankings. It is therefore important that you make use of these analytics and backlink analysis tools to know the effectiveness of your seo strategies.

The things like white hat versus black hat SEO are also a very important part of ranking best practices. In case of black hat SEO strategies, some of the SEO firms resort to using different types of techniques that might sometimes get them penalized by the search engines. There are many different types of strategies that have been used by SEO firms so as to manipulate the search results. Hence, it is important that you know about the different types of techniques and their effects on seo results. With a good understanding of the search results and SEO strategies, you can surely achieve your desired ranking.