1. What is SEO?
Getting Visitors onto Your Site
What is SEO?
How do you get your web site noticed? How are visitors supposed to know that your web site even exists?
The answer is through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
To begin this series on Web Site Optimisation, we are going to have a look at SEO, what it is, what it does and the best ways to implement it yourself.
The Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) definition of Search Engine Optimisation is as follows:
“Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimising a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.”
The majority of traffic on the web is driven by search engines (Google 37.3%, Yahoo 29.7%, MSN 15.8%, AOL 9.6%, Ask Jeeves 6.0%,Other 1.6% (Source: ComScore Media Metrix)), rather than someone typing your URL directly into the browser, or through links on other web sites. Whether your site provides content, services, products, or information, search engines are a primary method of navigation for almost all Internet users.
Google and other search engines are specifically set up to deliver relevant results and direct the user to the most appropriate pages according to the searched term. Your aim is to increase your site’s visibility and make it search engine friendly to improve traffic to your site, therefore receiving more business for your company.
Optimising your site and getting high up in the search results requires you to work hard on the content of your site. Unfortunately there are no shortcuts to take. Results will not be seen overnight, it takes time, and this is something to be aware of so do not to get disheartened or give up after one week.
The founding principal of optimising web pages for search engines hinges on the search terms, otherwise known as keywords. These are the words which you want search engines to associate with your pages, so that when someone searches using them, your page is one of the top results. It is important to understand and use keywords in your page title, meta descriptions, image alt and title tags, and the content on your site. We will discuss keywords in more detail in the next post.
When getting started, an important factor to consider is physical location. Search engines are increasingly attentive to the location where the content is hosted, so to give yourself as much chance as possible of appearing high in the results, host your web site in the nation that you are targeting.
You need to make your web site stand out from your competitors. You want to have good content that is updated regularly, unique and specific to your product/service and that will appeal to visitors. If you succeed in this, you will get return visitors, who may even link to your site, which is invaluable when it comes to higher ranking on search engines.
It is not necessarily about the amount of links you receive to your site however, it is the quality of links you receive. You will get more credit getting links from getting links from more respectable web sites such as CNN or BBC. Linking is possibly the hardest part of SEO to implement, as it is ultimately out of your control.
Tags: high rankings, html, Keywords, links, optimisation, Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engines, search term, SEO, traffic, web site content
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June 4, 2009 at 10:50 am
Link building is one of the good search engine optimization (SEO) solutions, which helps to provide improved visibility and high page rank to site. For a professional web developer, building links forms the spinal column of search engine optimization operations, which helps to bring quality of web traffic to your site. Link building is a well-organized way of increase the popularity of a site