SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a part of online marketing. It is optimization and modifications for a website oriented in search engines as Google or Yahoo. You can spend thousands of dollars per month for advertisements on the Internet, but if your website are in high ratings in search engines, it will bring more benefits and profits than investments in regular advertisements.

 

The existence of a website does not guarantee that it will be visible for search engines. After website development you need to invest into optimization of website. Main optimization is done once, but you need to improve and take care of your website all the time. You will have to invest both time and money until your website will be in high ratings. But once the investments is done, and if everything succeeds, the investments can pay off tenfold.
How does the search engine works?

 

 

The main and essential thing you need to understand in SEO is that the search engine is not a human. Search engines based on text searching. No matter how advanced technology is, search engines are far from "intelligent mind" that can sense color or design, or enjoy the beauty of sound or images. Instead, search engines bots enters web site and scans (index) whole web page code and then it try to guess about what the web site is.


First of all, search engines visits and index the various pages of your website to see what content you are publishing. All this is done by special software called "crawler", "spider" or simply "GoogleBot". These "spiders" follow links from one page to another, and index (read and memorize the code and the text of a Web page) everything it find and understand. Given how many pages there are in the world (over 65 billion, growing daily in 250,000 web pages) is technically impossible to visit all the sites on a daily basis to see if there is any new data, content or websites.

 

After the search engine visits your website, it indexes all the content and put everything on a huge databases. Basically, after indexing the website, search engine distinguish the keywords which corresponds to that particular page contents. Sometimes website can be assigned to the wrong keyword, but if we help search engines to optimize the site – it will be much easier to distinguish the content in your website. And it will be beneficial for you, because your website will be in better rankings.


How to optimize your website for search engines?


I will describe the seven steps to optimize your site for search engines. All seven steps must be repeated regularly. Steps  5-7 must be repeated quite often if you want to achieve noticeable results. Steps 1-4 do not require so much attention in later use, but it must be done in the very beginning of optimization. It does not mean those steps are not important (conversely, they are most important).


Steps that you do not need to repeat very often:



  1. Keyword Search

     

    Keyword search - the most important. You need to find 1-5 keywords or phrases that identifies your whole website (and its content), and also you need to find 1-3 keywords for every page on your website.

  2. Competitors

     

    Know your competitors! Analise their Web sites. What are they doing to be ranked better, which phrases or keywords they are using? How they advertise themselves?

  3. The first link to your website

     

    Do not submit your website to search engine and do not pay anyone to do so! There are many low-cost services, or software, which offers for very low price to submit your website in thousands of search engines, and in some cases even promise that you will be ranked in the first position. This is a reason why a lot of web projects fail. Search engines must naturally find your website, and they will find if you have backlinks to your website from other, already indexed websites. Why? Search engines and designed to follow links from page to page to discover web content. So all you need is to put hyperlinks (it must be active) from already indexed web pages to your website. There are many methods to get the first link to your website. For example, to write a classified ad. If you have an account in some forums, then you should put hyperlink to your website into forum account signature.. You can also buy (or exchange) links from other websites.

  4. Sitemap

     

    Biggest search engines allows website administrators to submit a sitemap. Sitemap is a file which lists all the web pages on your site, how often the page is edited, the last time modified, and so on. After submit of a sitemap, search engines provides information about Web bugs and errors (if any). Also, search engines provide an invaluable statistics about traffic, which was the highest rated keywords etc.

 

Steps which you need to repeat quite often:



  1. Site Analysis

     

    It is impossible to describe internet marketing success or failure if you do not follow your website performance. It is necessary to have a visitors counter. I recommend to use Google Analytics.

  2. Content creation

     

    Website is never finished. You have to improve it all the time. It must constantly change and grow. It is a natural adaptation to the ever-changing market process and it is necessary to place high-quality content which relates to the company‘s activity. In your website should be original, high quality content (text), which is unique (not found in any other website in the world). No one will be willing to advertise your website if there is no use of it.

  3. Backlinks

     

    Internet is a network of links from one page to another. Incoming links (from other sites) is very important for the natural flow of visitors. But incoming links are also very important for SEO, since search engines use them (the quantity and quality of backlinks) to rank websites. The more there are sites that have links leading to your web site, the better search engine ranks web site. But also very important is a quality of this incoming link. If you are selling shoes, then a high quality link would be a link from other high rated website. That link should be somewhere in the article about shoes (the topic of the text must be related to your activity and keywords).

 

Few other things that you should know about SEO (you must be familiar with HTML):

 

  1. Site <title> - in fact the most important factor in optimizing the site. Don't do them meaningless, and do not use too many words in it. In title should be included 2-4 main keywords which is related to that particular page content. <title> tag must be placed in websites <head> (it is not regular title of the text)
  2. There should be few keyword used in content (text). Do not use same keyword to different pages of your website. And use them sparingly, because if you will put too many keywords, then search engine will recognise them as a spam.
  3. Headlines <h1>, <h2>, <h3> ... Header text is considered more important than simple text. <h1> - most appreciated. So put some keywords into your headings.
  4. Text Links. Do not leave a link to your site with the text "click here" or "more information" and so on. Instead, try to put some keywords there.
  5. "Meta tags" as "description" and "keywords" are also quite important. Be sure not to leave them blank. Use the same keywords as well as you used in <title>.
  6. Do not use the same keywords in multiple pages.