SEO or search engine optimization is a process of optimizing your site so that it will rank better for any given set of keywords. These keywords can be entered directly into the search bar of google. Google ranks a website that ranks in the top ten of these results page as number one in their search results, therefore ranking in these top places guarantees traffic and traffic will bring sales. But how do you rank in these top places? How do you get traffic and how do you get sales?
SEO is the name of the game. It’s what drives the web and it’s what keeps it running. You see, web crawlers, those pesky little guys that live in Google, are constantly searching the web for information that might relate to a keyword you’ve entered, which can mean that they are doing a search for literally every word on your site.
The purpose of SEO is to make your site come up when a google search is done for a particular keyword. But how do you do that without looking like a spammer? The answer is SEO. What do you do? What do you think? You do what I do, you do what I think! You do what anyone would do, it’s what any self respecting expert would do! YOU DO WHAT ANY ANALYST WOULD DO! And you do it better!
Yea, it is what we do. SEO is our trade, our profession, our skill. When your site comes up in Google’s search results, that means it was optimized!
So what does SEO mean?
1. On-page Optimization: If you have a site full of keywords then it’s easy for you to get it optimized for a given keyword. But what does that mean? It means your site is made up of the right keywords, or else they wouldn’t come up in a google search. In other words, Google has decided that it likes what you have and it places your site in the top ten of its results.
2. Off-page Optimization: But what does that mean? It means you have to get people to link to your site, and those people have to have the same keywords in their links as you have, otherwise your site just won’t come up in their searches. This is where it really matters, how many sites will link to your site? How can you ensure your website shows up in the top ten? Simple. You have to have lots and lots of back links! That’s how!
3. Keywords: Keywords are important in SEO, if you have the right keywords then you are in the top ten. You can get your keyword picked up by many different sources and it increases your keyword count. There are several sources for keywords, free sources and paid sources. Paid sources are more common, however free sources are still very useful to have. You want to have keywords that have high searches, but low competition. That’s the key to ranking high!
4. Backlinks: Backlinks are like a popularity contest, if your site has lots of backlinks then it is popular. How do you get backlinks? Submit your site to many directories and search engines. Many other sites link back to yours! This will increase the number of their links, and will increase the popularity of your site. They link to your site because it is popular, not because you are popular.
5. Social Media: Social media allows you to build your reputation and lets you gain more backlinks. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are great sources of backlinks. The more pages that link to your site, the more popularity you have! You can also get links from your friends. If your friends also link back to your site, you have lots of incoming links. This is not as good as links from quality sites, but it’s good. This will increase your popularity and increase the number of links you have.
The search engines really want your site to be popular, because it can hurt your ranking if it thinks your site is not popular. As stated before, popular sites do not necessarily stay popular, and so the search engines need to make sure you stay popular, otherwise you may fall out of the rankings and be overlooked.
So, to stay in the rankings, your site needs to build popularity through SEO, and also by getting backlinks. Both of these are done by making your site popular, but to a much larger number of people. Remember, the more links you get, the more popularity you have, therefore the more people will link to your site. This will further increase your popularity, and your popularity increases the higher you will rank on Google.
Social Media as a whole can help in SEO. Creating and maintaining a Facebook fan page allows you to gain links and popularity. The more fans you have, the more links you get to your site, and the higher you rank.
The other big part of SEO is not having to implement tag creation or design every time you want to add text. Instead you can save your time by using free programs like word press, and run them on your server. Each of these can do a lot of SEO and content creation for you, and save you a lot of money in the process.
Now that you know about SEO, I hope you will go ahead and put some of these to use. Remember this information is meant for information purposes only, and should not be construed as legal advice.
