Many people new to internet marketing wonder why search engine optimization, or SEO, is so important. In explaining why, this article could be very short or very long, according to how much of the topic I wish to write on, although the answer is basically a matter of common sense.

Anybody who uses search engines to find out information, which is the vast majority of internet users, uses phrases to find the information they are seeking. These phrases, to them, best describe the information they seek. Thus, if the are looking for information on what to look for when buying a second hand car they might use the term ‘buying second hand cars’, or ‘buying used cars’, or ‘how to buy used cars’ and so on. Each of these terms is commonly termed a ‘keyword’, and searching for the most used keywords, or even lesser used keywords, is big business on the internet.

If you have a website, or even just one web page, dealing with that topic, you can optimize it only for one of these keywords if you want the bets results. Many people make the mistake of trying to optimize a webpage for all the keywords they can think of, totally ignorant of the fact that if they have 20 keywords then they should have 20 web pages, each optimized for one keyword.

Some people make millions of dollars explaining to others how to find and use these keywords on their websites, even though it is historical information. Yesterdays most frequently used keyword could never be used again for the rest of the year. Let me give you an example of that.

When I was new to internet marketing, I wrote a website to sell my trivia quizzes. I run trivia quizzes in my local pub, and at that time also sold them to pubs in nearby towns and cities and wrote a book on how to go about it. I decided to advertise it online and also to sell my trivia quizzes. I paid $6,500 for a mentor from Corey Rudl’s Internet Marketing Center to teach me how to do it, and I was shown how to use keyword research to publicize my book.

My mentor ended up recommending I use the keyword ‘black American history quiz’ since it had a very high demand and low supply: so I did. Silly me! He was Canadian, and he didn’t know that the word ‘quiz’ in the USA can also apply to a school exam, and the ‘black American history quiz’ was in demand by American high school kids for an exam on the topic.

I spent a fortune and made zilch. That is the last time I paid for information, and I was ripped off by the late Corey Rudl and his so-called Internet Marketing Center. At least that is my experience. It was only later that I found I could have got the same information free by registering for a few newsletters from other marketers.

I ended up losing many thousands of dollars through that experience, and using the bad information I was given, and am only now making up for it. That is the importance of knowing how to use SEO in your website. Learn how to select and use proper keywords, and do not be mislead by trends or spikes due to high school exams or current news as I was.

There are techniques to use to ensure that your website gets traffic from people browsing the web for information. If you know these techniques, you can make money from any topic, or niche, even if you personally know nothing about it. I have many websites on a number of topics, each of which makes me money in many different ways. There is no reason why you should do the same.

However, to do that, you must learn how to optimize each of the pages on your website. Stop regarding the site as an entity. It is the collection of pages that is important, each of those of which has to be treated as a separate entity. Every page will be listed separately in the search engines, and you need to know how to treat each differently, and how to optimize each so that every one will be listed in the search results when somebody uses your keyword to find the information they are seeking.

Good search engine optimization is very important, and without a good understanding of SEO, your internet business will have less a chance of success.