The Basics of SEO
SEO has practically become a household term today, thanks to the online marketers and gurus who sing its praises. What exactly is it, and how can SEO help you in your business? This article gives the basic information about SEO, including some terms that a beginning online marketer should know.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the term used to describe the tools and techniques used in promoting websites in order to boost its ranking in search engines.
Think for a minute about a time when you made use of a search engine. When you type a certain term on the field, the search engine will then regurgitate several websites that are related to the search term that you entered. Studies have shown that most people don’t go beyond the first page of these results when they search for something online. As such, it is vitally important for online marketers to get as high a page rank as possible, because this increases the traffic going to their website (thus increasing the likelihood of making sales). This is where SEO comes in.
How Does SEO Work?
What SEO essentially does is that it literally optimizes your website to make it more easily found by the search engine spiders, codes used by the search engines to match the search terms to the content of websites. For example, if you enter the term “Bluetooth headphones”, what the search engine spiders will do is to find the websites that have the most in common with the search term that you typed. It’s not just the title that should be optimized; search engine spiders go through all of your content in order to rank the results as effectively as possible. Some of the issues that are considered are:
* The actual text in the page;
* The words used in the URL of the page;
* The number of internal links (the links from other pages of the same website) that point to the page;
* The number of external links (the links from other websites) that point to the page;
* The text used to label the internal and external links; and
* The age of the domain name.
A good SEO company will ideally take all of these factors and more to ensure that their clients will be at the top of the search engine results of the top search engines on the Internet.
Important SEO Terms
Listed below are some of the most important SEO terms that an online marketer should know:
* Keyword research. The use of keywords is the heart of SEO. You will need to do a bit of research to understand and anticipate what string of words users will be typing on search engines when they’re looking for something.
* Keyword density. It’s not only the string of keywords that’s important in SEO; the number of times that the keywords are used is also important in order for search engine spiders to find your website. Some experts say that 4% should be the maximum keyword density that you use on each page.
* Article directories. You shouldn’t just focus on your website for effective SEO. You can also submit informative articles to article directories to gain more mileage to your website (since you can post a link back at the end of your article) as well as to boost your reputation as an expert in your niche.
* Link building. As you may have realized, SEO is essentially a popularity contest, which means that you want more websites that are pointing at your pages.
* White-hat and black-hat techniques. There are two kinds of techniques in SEO: black-hat techniques are underhanded tactics that you can use to put your website at the top of the search results. While this can certainly put your website as a frontrunner in page rankings, the amount of time it spends on top is usually short-lived, since search engines do not look kindly at websites that try to cheat the system. White-hat techniques, on the other hand, follow the rules and regulations of proper SEO so that you will be able to boost your page ranking safely.
These are barely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEO. If you want to find out more about how to optimize your website, do make sure that you do research in order to pick up the skills and information that you need in order to succeed in the industry.