The number of people who use the Internet on a daily basis is well over a billion and this figure keeps rising everyday which is probably why you have never quite understood why your website goes for days on end without as much as a single person visiting. Using the system of probabilities, with that many users on the Internet and each browsing multiple pages every single day then your website should be able to garner at least a decent number of visitors in at least a week but the truth is, that is just not how things work on the net. Majority of Internet users have very similar web browsing habits and chief among this is the use of search engines. To help you understand just how great an impact search engines have heard, recall that Google was once worth close to nothing but is now worth Billions.
This means that for you to have any success in getting any attention in the direction of your website, you have to know how to work the system of search engines. First of all you have to understand that it is not enough to get your website listed on the search engines database. When a user searches a particular keyword, chances are that he will get anything between a thousand and millions of results but why would they care to check the website that is a thousand pages away when the first two results have all that he needs. This means that to get any hits on your website, you have to find a way of ensuring your website is somewhere on the first page and this is where SEO comes in.
SEO stands for one of two things; it could either mean search engine optimisation which is the process by which the accessibility of a website on a search engine is improved through search results. SEO could also stand for search engine optimizers which is the name of given to those who do the job of optimisation. SEO takes into consideration the kind of things people search for and the specific keywords that they use. Using this, they can redesign or remodel their websites HTML and content to make it more relevant to the keywords.
If you have never tried out SEO then you also need to take a lot of caution in how you use this skill. Filling your websites content with all the right keywords will get you quite a lot of visibility on search engines but only for as long as the search engines will let you operate since these methods of SEO along with use of link farms and article spinning are usually classified into what is now known as black hat SEO which basically work by spamming the search engines index much like the way someone may spam millions of email addresses knowing he is likely to get a few hits purely by luck. The easiest, safest and most convenient way of going about SEO is to acquire the services of a search engine optimizer as they already know what to do and how to do it.
Farhan Fawzer is a Sri Lankan SEO Specialist and Online Marketing Consultant.