Understanding the Importance of Search Engine Optimization

Talk about search engine optimization (SEO) usually puts most people to sleep. We're not going to lie: Hardcore SEO is a time-consuming job that requires a strong analytical mind. Casual bloggers, or even most small-business owners, don't need to understand all the minute details that go into SEO. However, everyone with a web site that desires traffic needs to get familiar with some of the basic concepts and best practices. Why, you ask?

One thousand pageviews. That's why.

Of course, you're not going to get 1,000 page views right off the bat by changing your SEO.

SEO deals with following best practices when it comes to blogging. By just following these simple guidelines and by using WordPress, you can increase search engine traffic to your blog. Period. To be honest, you probably won't rank number one in really tough categories just by following SEO best practices. But you definitely can increase your traffic significantly and improve your rank for some long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are keywords that aren't searched for often, but when you amass ranking for a lot of them over a period of time, the traffic adds up.

Bloggers want as many search results as possible on the first two pages of Google and other search engines to be from their blogs. (Most search-engine visitors don't go past the first two pages of Google.) This search-results aim is a more reasonable goal than trying to rank number one for a highly competitive keyword. If you really do want to rank number one in a competitive space, check out sites such as SEO Book (www.seobook.com) or SEOmoz (www.seomoz.org), which can help you achieve that difficult goal.