Welcome to part one of this ten-part course about search engine optimization, or SEO. You probably know something about SEO already. But even if you don’t, if you follow along with each lesson and take the steps suggested, you’re going to see a great improvement in traffic from your audience.

A Search Engine’s Purpose

The purpose of a search engine like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others, is to deliver relevant content to their audience based on their search. In the old days of the internet, this was not done very well. For example, if you went online and looked for a word like “jugs” and you meant ceramic jugs, you would end up with a long list of porn sites to weed through.

That wasn’t what the audience wanted at all, so search engines had to figure out how to better show their audience what they really wanted. They created algorithms that were designed to crawl the web to locate the best content for their users. That’s how SEO became so important. SEO helps you let the search engines know that your content is authoritative, well-written, and targeted.

Today, Google and other search engines make it their mission to deliver the best, highest quality content to their users that they can. Sadly, there is a lot of trash on the internet, so this not an easy job. Due to this, you can use SEO to ensure that search engines show your website as a choice when a customer searches for information related to your niche. In many ways, SEO is just a way to ensure that people find you, so that you can grow your traffic and your business.

Create Your SEO Goals

Now that you know what search engines are for and why SEO exists, it’s time to determine your goals for SEO. That’s the best way to start so that you can go through your website and fix any issues that are impeding your efforts to get targeted traffic to your website.

So first, to set your SEO goals, determine your strategic SEO objective. Here are some examples:

* Increase organic search visibility by 40% within 4 months
* Increase inbound links by 30% within 6 months
* Increase targeted traffic by 50% within 12 months
* Increase lead captures (email list) by 25% within 12 months

These are just examples, and your numbers will be different based on the time you have to spend on the project. As you see, to accomplish creating these goals you need to know where you stand now. So, before you go further with this, take a look at where you are now so that you know what numbers you’re starting with as you audit your SEO throughout this 10-part eCourse.

Next time, we’ll talk more about technical information surrounding SEO and how you can use technology to make your job easier, faster, and more efficient.