If you think it's easy to get a visitor to search for your website, find it, read it (meticulously) and bookmark it, well - you're deluded. The majority of web hits these days (they don't call it visits anymore) occur through search engine crawlers - leaving alone the ones that are referred from somewhere else (usually costs money) or if your friends and family trying their best to promote you through chain mail. The question is - how do you get the attention of the search engines?
Of the several methods purported to work well in garnering web crawler attention, putting up small, snappy articles crafted specifically for the search engines using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques is the most cost-effective and intuitively simple way to do so. Needless to say, your website must convey the impression to the reader that they are actually getting something they need or enjoy out of their time visiting you (an important principle for first dates too)!
SEO "crawlers" can be a website's best friend, or worst enemy. If your business site contains irrelevant content or hard to digest information, then no matter how well you have optimized your key words for the search engines, your page ranking will drop faster than it rises. After all, its humans who read it, not machines. SEO must go had in hand with good, well-structured content. If you do not write well it is essential that you learn to do so or hire someone to write for you. When the crawler comes across the keywords in the content, and brings up your site, the content on that particular page must be related to the keywords you have filled it with.
For good keyword optimization, one of the tools to consider here is "keyword density." This is helpful to have the main keywords show up enough times to be catch a crawler's attention, but low enough to maintain readability: not to read like ''The Eagles of California have seen a sharp rise in their California Eagles fan base, despite the fact that eagles in recent years have become fewer around California" (real-life now defunct example, passed into web lore). Most keyword densities should reside between 3 to 5 % - any higher and you risk being rejected as a spammer. Some sites will still raise this percentage (greedily) in order to get more hits, but the content can be insufferable to read and will turn off your visitors.
A bit of history now as to why working with very high keyword densities can make it difficult for a site is that some search engines actually blacklist sites with unreasonably high keywords. Google's folks, amongst their many pioneering inventions, started using this technique with their crawlers to filter out spammers above the 5 % threshold. In today's Internet marketing, a savvy copywriter should maintain a nice balance between flow and skilled use of keywords. Many copywriters have started using "secondary" keywords. These, specially placed within the context, increase the number of hits for a page. This technique becomes useful in that the copywriter has more breathing space to work - and provide infotainment.
More and more potential customers are getting online to do their own research before any purchase, and websites have become more than just marketing tools. It's your electronic 'showroom' so to speak, and the more well-planned, elegant and informative articles you produce that have the right balance of keyword density, the higher your chance for retaining and even repeating business.
