If you’re looking online for a product you want to buy, where do you start? With a major search engine? Well, if you’re like many Internet users, the answer is no. You start at your favorite shopping site. Late in 2018, eMarketer reported that almost half of all American Internet users begin their search at Amazon and about a third began at Google.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a strange business. It’s full of conjecture, misinformation, and snake oil. SEO businesses are 80 percent scam, so if you hire someone to do it for you, you’ve got one chance in five of things going well. Therefore, you need to understand the basics of SEO so that you can either create a search engine–friendly website yourself or find a firm that knows what it’s doing.

When a search engine returns its search results, it gives you two types: organic and paid. Organic search results are the Web page listings that most closely match the user’s search query based on relevance. Also called “natural” search results, ranking high in the organic results is what SEO is all about. Paid results are basically advertisements — the Web site owners have paid to have their Web pages display for certain keywords, so these listings show up when someone runs a search query containing those keywords.

To get a better handle on search engine optimization, it's important to understand why people use search engines, at all. Generally, people use search engines for one of three things: research, shopping, or entertainment. Someone may be doing research for restoring their classic car. Or looking for a place that sells parts for classic cars.

Much like the main Google search index, Google Local is the most popular local vertical search engine out there. Submitting your site to Google Local enables you to show up for local queries, appear on Google Maps for searches there, and of course, appear for relevant general queries via blended search when Google detects that a local result is appropriate.

When you're structuring the HTML coding for a Web page, it can look a little like an outline, with main headings and subheadings. For best SEO results, it is important to place keywords in those headings, within Heading tags. Heading tags are part of the HTML coding for a Web page. Headings are defined with H1 to H6 tags.

If you want to list your ads so that they display in paid search engine results, you can use Google AdWords. AdWords is Google’s paid search program that lets you create your own ads, choose your keyword phrases, set your maximum bid price, and specify a budget. If you’re having trouble creating ads, Google has a program to help you create and target your ads.

Duplicate content can create a lot of problems for search engines, and so for the best search engine optimization (SEO) results, you should remove it from your Web site. Content on the Web and on your own site can become duplicated either intentionally or by accident. Whatever the copycat’s motivation is, you don’t want people copying your original content if you can help it.