As you probably know, the point of SEO is to get the search engines to send visitors to your website. Traffic is what it’s all about, and SEO is meant to generate traffic.

SEO accomplishes this by helping you come up high in Google’s search results for your most important keyword phrases.

But is SEO difficult? Do you need special skills to be effective? Is it a mysterious art that only a few understand?

Not at all. Getting good search engine ranking is not as difficult as you might think. Even if you have failed miserably in the past, you can be successful right now by applying some very basic principles.

SEO is really just common sense once you understand it.

So how DO you choose the right search terms and then come up high in search engine results pages (SERPs) for your keywords?

You have to think like a search engine.

That’s right. You have to think like a search engine.

And the most important thing to understand is that search engines only read what is there on the page. They do not read between the lines or make assumptions about your content like humans do.

That means you have to clearly spell out what each page is about. Thinking like a search engine means you shouldn’t make your visitors read between the lines to figure out what your content is about.

For instance, if a particular web page is about “Big Green Widgets”, then the search engines should be able to clearly see that and then put that in their database: “This page is about ‘Big Green Widgets’.”

So then, when somebody does a search for “Big Green Widgets” your page has a good chance of coming up in the search results.

So you have to anticipate what search terms people will use when searching for your product or service - and then capture that in terms of your keywords or search terms.

It’s all about keywords or keyword phrases or search terms. These are the words or phrases that people search for when looking for your product or service.

You have to find the right keyword phrase or search term and then focus each specific page on a specific search term.

There are important ways to focus your content so the search engines recognize the theme of each page. But to keep it simple, the more you say about your target search term, the more likely you are to score well for it.

Common sense, right? Optimizing a page means focusing on a specific term and going out of your way to emphasize that search term in the text of your page.

It isn’t magic. It is common sense. If a page has lots of content focused on a specific keyword it will score well for that term.

That’s what it means to “Think Like a Search Engine.”

For a limited time you can get a free keyword analysis and SEO summary for your most important keywords - to help you score better with the search engines.

In the meantime, remember to think like a search engine, and get those top positions in Google.