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:
- Keyword Search
- Competitors
- The first link to your website
- Sitemap
Steps which you need to repeat quite often:
- Site Analysis
- Content creation
- Backlinks
Few other things that you should know about SEO (you must be familiar with HTML):
- 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)
- 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.
- Headlines <h1>, <h2>, <h3> ... Header text is considered more important than simple text. <h1> - most appreciated. So put some keywords into your headings.
- 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.
- "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>.
- Do not use the same keywords in multiple pages.