You may have heard about the amazing benefits Search Engine Optimization can bring to your business and projects on the internet. When a website’s optimization is maximized on search engines, it’s visibility and ranking among millions of other websites is greatly improved, bringing numerous advantages to your marketing endeavors.
SEO can be likened to a kid’s new lemonade stand which he wants to be made known all over his village to get customers. In order to do this, he needs to use techniques that would make his stand popular and make it appear to be the best lemonade stand around.
So how does optimization work? Its roots can be traced from search engines’ basic functions: crawling, indexing, calculating relevance, ranking and delivery of results. When a query is entered in the search box, the web server (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing) forwards the query to the index servers.
The index servers are like a table of content in books that tell you where a certain topic can be found – in this case, those that match the query. It then travels to the document servers where the actual stored documents are found. Short descriptions are made from these documents which in turn are shown as results within fraction of a second after hitting enter in the search box.
Therefore, the goal of optimizing is to get your website’s pages frequently indexed by search engines, making sure it is included in the first page results of the query. Optimizing your website is not an easy and overnight process.
Since a complex and well-hidden algorithm governs how search engines index websites, all you can do is to further push the potential of your website’s optimization. This can be accomplished by taking into consideration the most important factors of SEO: content and links.
Content
I bet no one would even try to touch and eat a pizza that is black. This is because, more often than not, your opinions are influenced by what you see. First, a website would not gain a frequent number of visitors if the site is not visually appealing.
Pictures, easy navigation, an interesting layout, ease of use, and a good structure will be your first step in catching the attention of visitors. Even if the black pizza tastes delicious, people wouldn’t know because they won’t even bother trying it out. The same applies to badly designed websites.
When the visual appearance of the website is done, what’s going to be on it should also be given more attention. In fact, it’s the content that the search engines crawl and search for during queries. This is called On-Site SEO and it optimizes your website from within. Check out the SEOmoz article on-site SEO best practices for better understanding.
How the target words and keywords are strategically placed in your website is crucial. Including them in your page titles, headings, sub-heading, meta tags, and meta descriptions will allow the crawlers to find and index your site.
Deep links or backlinks that serve as navigation to your site’s sub-pages are also very important since they tell the search engines about the sub-components of your site, that they have been found and linked by other sites, which makes them appear valuable.
The content of the website should not be made up of fluff and bombarded with the overuse of target words or keywords. It should be original, interesting and updated regularly in order to continue your progress in search results ranking. Check out the Copy Blogger’s guide to creating content that ranks well in search engines for better understanding of the power of content in search engine ranking.
Well-written and useful content will not only increase your site’s reputation but will also attract more visitors that are after credible information and not just automated content, false advertisements and rewritten articles.
Links
Links play an important role in Off-Site SEO (which optimizes your website from outside). For better understanding, check the Hubspot’s Off-page SEO tactics.
On-site SEO capitalizes on managing your websites’ internal structure. Off-site, on the other hand, makes use of link exchanges and deep links. Link exchanges can be very useful, especially for newly-created webpages. Trading links with other webmasters can also increase a site’s traffic but do not do as much as deep links.
Deep links are navigation of sub-pages in a website. This is very effective for search engine optimization especially if high-quality sites have found your sub-pages very useful and included them as a link on their webpage.
No established webmaster would endanger his reputation by advertising a useless webpage, after all. Therefore, deep links are one of the most important factors in increasing your visibility in search engines. But of course, for this to actually work, you’ll still need quality content.
Getting in the top ten search results takes time, effort and reputation. It is important to know how SEO works and create content and pages that do not only provide information needed by your target consumers but are also credible and interestingly-delivered. Follow these steps and in no time, like a kid with the new lemonade stand, you will see your business progress.
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