If you have spent any time online reading about ways to get more site traffic, you have undoubtedly heard references to search engine optimization. SEO refers to a plethora of methods to inflate the amount of consumer traffic your site catches, usually by achieving higher rankings within the search engines when certain keywords are entered.

The basics of good SEO can be broken down into several major parts, and they all have to do with making yourself more visible to the flow of traffic coming from the major search engines.Didn’t catch that? This explains it. One of the methods that receives a lot of attention is gaining backlinks from other sites that share similar content. Backlinks are links to your website that another webmaster places on their site, and in exchange you place a link to their site on yours. So it is basically an exchange of links between sites, and both end up benefiting.

The reason both sites benefit from this is something called pagerank. Pagerank is partially determined by the number of backlinks you have leading to your site, so it is clear that the more backlinks you manage to get, the more pagerank you will have. The more pagerank you get, the higher up your site is on the search engine listings. Other elements of SEO involve working with meta tags and meta keywords, and it is advised to use a moderate amount of meta keywords to avoid keyword cramming.

Between adding good keywords that are relevant to your content and gaining backlinks to increase pagerank, your site will notice a definite increase in visitors. Those visitors may not stay however unless you have good original content. Content is the most important aspect of SEO, and sadly one of the more overlooked. Content will determine if your site visitors are repeat, or just in passing.