Search engine optimization is important if you want to reach a target audience and stay abreast of your competition. With SEO, the search engines can spider your content and help users to find you. Using specific keywords that flow in your content is instrumental in reaching that goal. With the proper SEO, the search engine will give you the relevant page rank so that your website appears toward the top of the search engine when users try to find you. SEO is not just to be done in a single sitting. It is an unending process that does require you to create, maintain, monitor, test and fine tune it. You will find several integral steps of how to strategize your search engine optimization for the best results.

Marketing to your Target Audience
Before you can even consider marketing to your target audience, you have to analyze the keywords that you will be using so as to determine how you will position in the search engines after users search for those keywords. This means that you have to look at what your potential users are searching for and what keywords they are using. In addition to website analysis, you have to see what your competition is doing as well. Therefore, you have to research to find the keywords that your competitors are using. How do you get this done? Use a few keywords, which you will type into the search engines. Look at the top five results that come up and spy on what they are doing. Nothing is wrong with spying as long as you don’t plagiarize. You will find out from your observation – the various keywords pulling the most audience interest.

Analyzing Keywords
Start by reviewing the list of keywords on your competition’s list. Piggyback on this strategy by expanding your keywords search and analyzing each to see which gets more results.  You should then prioritize your list using:

• Keywords
• Keyword phrases
• Misspell keywords
• Pluralized keywords
• Singular keywords

Use a spreadsheet to keep track of the search engine results. Do this every week until you are comfortable with it, then do it once per month when you notice changes in your web traffic.

Optimizing Content
When you create content, make sure that the keywords are in the title of the page and within the body of the content. Don’t pack your content with keywords or the search engine will penalize you. Instead, try to provide valuable content and let the keywords flow naturally. You could also place keywords into your source code, which means that unless the user views the source code, it cannot be seen right away. Place keywords after every 100 words for the natural approach. Make sure you have meta tags that describe what the page is about and place keywords into your meta tag as well.

Conclusion
SEO is a continuous testing and tweaking. It is not a science, so you have to do what is best for your business. In addition, search engine optimization is an ongoing learning process even for the pro. So, don’t feel bad if you have to keep in line with the changing dynamics.