It can be quite confusing for local business owners to understand search engine optimization and SEO services. With everyone claiming to be a professional it can be hard to judge a SEO company for quality. That is why you need to start getting educated.

Understand Search Engine Optimization and SEO Services in 3 Easy Steps

1. Keyword Research

Before you go and hire a company to do 'search engine optimization' you need to understand that there are good keywords and bad keywords.

A lot of people go for the two extremes when it comes to keyword research. They feel that they have to be on the first page of Google for major keyword of their niche (which also happens to be the most competitive) or they want to rank for keywords that they think they need to rank for (but actually receive no traffic).

When you try to analyze keywords without the right tools it can be quite hard, but most SEO experts will use one or more seo keyword research tools that will tell you each related keyword and the amount of times that it is searched (plus the competition you will have if you try to rank for that keyword).

2. On Page SEO

Once you understand that there are good and bad keywords to target the focus turns to your website and optimizing the pages to your chosen 'good keywords'.

There is a lot of theory when it comes to the optimization of your actual website for search engine optimization and SEO services providers will be able to help you with this. But a few quick points that are important are:

• Make sure your keyword is in your 'page title'

• Include your keyword in [h1, h2, h3] tags (Paragraph Titles)

• Link to that page from your other pages (using the keyword as anchor text)

But from a usability point of view, make sure that you keep your website personable and visitor focused. There is nothing worse than going to a website that you know has been written for search engines.

3. Off Page SEO

Once your website is fully optimized using the seo services and techniques above you need to start looking to build your websites popularity. Google gives each link that you receive from another website a 'weight' and the more weight that you receive to a given page helps to improve your ranking in the search engines.

Some ways that you can gain links to your website are:

• Writing Articles

• Leaving Blog Comments

• Creating Link Bait

• Writing Guest Posts on Blogs

If you follow these three simple steps then you will start to see your website quickly climbing the search engine pages, ranking for the keywords that you desire.