Webmasters, being much good at website designing, writing stuff etc. are always not successful as most fail at search engine optimization. I have seen that when asking people about SEO, 7 out of 10 people really don’t know the actual meaning of search engine optimization. When asked a foolish person “How do you optimize your website for search engines?”, he just said “By submitting to directories, building links, submitting to search engines!!!”. I laughed with myself reading that. People really need to learn about things before they talk something.

So i decided to help out people who are having very less knowledge in this field, here are a few basic things you need to know about search engine optimization.

Definition of Search engine optimization – It is an art of making a website relevant to a subject and worked on to make it rank higher and better in search results for specific keywords. Search engine optimization can be done by a few ways, the main aim being make search engines love your website.

There are two main components of Search engine optimization -

• Keywords – That decides the relevancy of your website to a particular niche.
• Backlinks – This shows how important your page is and how many pages are linking to your website. More backlinks indicate more importance of the website.

Now talking about the keywords, how are they important?
Search engines are automated machines that send some robots or spiders to your website, and the spiders crawl your html codes and finds the keywords that you used, and the keywords are the actual things you have to take card of. As people search for some keyword and you are targeting to rank for those keywords.
In some later posts, i would be explaining more about how to select the best keywords, how to use these keywords etc.

Backlinks, why are these necessary - Once a few websites link to your website, this shows that your website is important and has something good in it. The more number of links you have your way, the importance of your website increases, and thus the rankings of your websites increases gradually in search engines. But don’t always look for the number, rather go for backlinks in quality websites.

Which are the best search engines?
There are millions of search engines on the web, but there is no need for you to submit your website to every search engine, and of course it would take ages for you to submit your website to all the search engines. There are a handful number of search engines that maintains good integrity and provide the best search results for the end user. Here are a few of those -
Google – Add your website to google here.
Yahoo! Search – Add your website to Yahoo! Search here.
Live Search – Add your website to Live Search here.
Ask Jeeves
Alta Vista
All The Web – Gets updated with yahoo results. Add to Yahoo and you will be add into this search engine too.

Just submit your website once, although a few search engines would accept submissions more than once, it is advised to submit your website once.
If or not you submit your website to Google, i always had good experience with it and without submitting my website to Google, it gets directly added to its search engine database.

Conclusion - I know this post was very basic for most of you, but there are still people who are unsure of many basic things in SEO, this post is mostly for them.