A Beginner s Guide to SEO Part 1 - What is SEO, And All About The Search Engines
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short is a term referring to a series of techniques people use to get their websites ranked higher in the search engines.
The principal advantage of SEO is the fact that search engine traffic can be massive, and it is free.
In business, you are much more likely to be successful if you get a lot of traffic--whether it's traffic to your website, or cars driving by your storefront, or the amount of people who walk through your door.
Knowing this, it is a complete no-brainer that you should implement SEO strategies immediately, and if you don't work on your website, you should get your web designer to implement these techniques. Don't assume that because your site was professionally designed, it is automatically set up for good search engine rankings. I have met, and worked with several web designers who know very little about SEO, and did not design their sites with SEO in mind.
Anyway, enough talk. As I said earlier, SEO is a set of techniques you can use to get ranked higher in the search engines.
The first step in SEO is realizing a few things.
1. Search engines exist to provide users with relevant search results to search queries.
Search Engines therefore need:
a. Answers for questions
b. Information on where those answers are
Once it has these two things, it can return a list of relevant web pages to your search query.
2. As a website hoping to gain traffic from the search engines, it is your job to provide those two things to the search engines.
This concept is the most important piece of information you can use to develop an SEO strategy.
To be ranked well in the search engines, you need to have good information. There are plenty of SEO's (Search Engine Optimizers) out there who claim they can get good traffic to their websites from the search engines by providing mediocre information, yet using their SEO techniques to drive their rankings up. While this may be true today, it certainly won't be true tomorrow as search engines continue to optimize their algorithms to provide more relevant results to search queries.
No one really knows what the search engine algorithms are, but if they do change (as they have in the past), they will get smarter in determining good content from bad content.
Knowing this, before you even begin search engine optimizing your site, you need to have a content strategy.
People who are serious about optimizing their site for the search engines do a lot of research on what to write about. Usually this process involves finding out how many people search for a particular keyword, then analyzing how many web pages exist that cater to that keyword. Keywords that have a lot of searches (demand), and few webpages devoted to them (supply) are the ideal topics. This approach is likely to have a long-lasting positive effect on your search engine rankings, but let's face it: It's a long process, it's boring, and it's very tedious. There are several software packages available that can drastically cut the amount of time it takes to do this research, and if you are very serious about designing your website to be highly optimized, I would recommend checking them out.
However, for the rest of us, we're more concerned with writing about what we know, and not being so concerned with the competition. You can certainly still do very well for yourself without doing this preliminary research. What will ultimately determine your search engine rankings is determined by three main elements, in order of importance:
1. Content
2. Links
3. Coding
All three of these elements have several sub-elements that will ultimately make up your SEO strategy.