There's no doubt that being on the search engines has it's benefits, being on the search engines not only will attract more exposure to your business but more customers as well. Because search engine optimization is all about picking the right keywords, you won't find better targeted customers than the ones searching for what you sell. In this article we will discuss the methods and benefits of SEO.

Just like link building, keyword research is extremely important before you attempt any optimization to your site. Your keyword research will reveal which keywords you should target and which ones you shouldn't bother with. Once this process is done then you can start optimizing your website for those targeted keywords. This is only the first step of properly optimizing a website for the search engines.

A quick way to get the ball rolling is to signup for local listings from Google and Yahoo which are free. You can use free listings to give your site an initial exposure while you work on the SEO aspects of your site. The more exposure and traffic you are able to get the better.

A major tip to increase the process of getting indexed and also to get your website content crawl by the search engines spiders is including a sitemap. By getting your content crawl often you'll find that most of your pages will be visible on multiple search engines. Some bigger sites sometimes require more than one, but if you have a site on a small niche one should be enough.

You can get a little more SEO performance by taking your website into the blogging world. Start a blog of your own, and get involved with other blogs that cover related topics. The algorithms used by search engines are particularly favorable towards blogs. Blogs are consistently updated and have structured data, both things which algorithms like. To rank sites highly, search engines like to see quality backlinks pointing to your site.

As pointed out in the beginning of the article, search engine optimization is simply a formula based upon popular keywords used by search engines. By using these words in your website, the search engine will direct the searcher to the websites that have those keywords as a part of their website. By implementing the techniques presented in this article, you can design a website that gets maximum search engine exposure through the strategic use of keywords & backlinking.