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SEO stands for search engine optimization and is the name for numerous techniques for increasing website traffic numbers. There are a lot of techniques to use, many are easier than others. Briefly, SEO increases your presence on search engines which increases your traffic numbers. The goal for all SEO is to get your website to appear as number one for searches.

A fantastic first step is to make sure your blog is already optimized correctly. Make sure to use appropriate meta keys and meta descriptions so that search engines can spider your website correctly. Once this is done you will not have to look at it again. If your blog is about food, write a description, a title and some keywords all targeting your topic. Your meta title and description will also be shown in search engine results so make sure it is relevant and correct.

Secondly, it is very important to write good content. Plagiarizing content from other sources will get you marked down by search engines. Search engines have become highly developed and clever at offering their users the best content. Thus, if you merely plagiarize content you will be penalized and marked down in the search rankings.

Building links to your site is the next step once you have optimized your website correctly and have written good, original, content. Search engines determine how good your website is by how many inbound links you have. I.e., if your website has more links than another, search engines will rank you higher and you will get more traffic. If you write good content that is keyword driven then this will happen organically but it can take a while. However, if you want to see faster results you might want to try some of the techniques below.

Firstly, submit content to article directories. These can sometimes be tough to get accepted to as they want good, original content but for every article you write and submit to you will get two or more links back to your website from a high ranking website. Search engines really like this. SEO is a game of sorts - trying to get quality links from quality sites.

You can also manually build links to your website by commenting on forums and blogs. Some blog owners and forum admins will allow dofollow links to your website. Dofollow is not an actual HTML tag but it is the colloquial name for the opposite of the nofollow tag in HTML. Nofollow was first created because people used to pay for links to their website or spam lots of links. Search engines will ignore nofollow links and you will not get any SEO benefit. Try to find some blogs that may allow you to link to your site. This will benefit the SEO of your website, increase your online presence and will allow you to network with your fellow bloggers within the blogosphere. The comments should be genuine and relevant to the content. In the majority of cases, writing something self-promotional (such as: "why not visit my home page?") will not get accepted and you will have wasted time and effort. You should always aim to be a productive commenter.

Online book marking websites are also a good way to increase your SEO. You should not spam your blog though, admins are very good at spotting this. Similar to directories, you will be able to receive a good inbound link from a good quality website. Well established websites have greater weight given to them by search engines. Effectively, this means you will get more search engine optimization benefits from an established website than a newer site. In other words, a link from a popular online book marking website will give you more SEO benefits than a smaller website.

A final tip is to add your website to online directories. They may be annoying to setup but you will get a good inbound link for your site if you manage it. Many directories have high page rankings. However, submitting your site to a directory can get confusing because there are usually different submission options. There are normally different payment options. The three options normally are: paid for, free with reciprocal links and free without reciprocal links. If you can pay for links (although they can be quite costly) then you will see your website fast tracked into the directory. A free link may take months to be approved (as there is often a long waiting list for websites to be accepted). Reciprocal links are not necessarily beneficial for your SEO (these aren't given credence like one-way links). You may find that they are useful for referral traffic but for SEO they are not useful.

If you follow the above hints and tips then you should see an improvement in your search engine rankings. You should also definitely use search analytics for reporting the search engine traffic and carefully managing your efforts. This way you will be able to see what has the most benefit and what you can focus more on.