Search Engine Optimization

For Beginners

By Ryan Rogers

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing a websites overall rank in search engines, by following search engine rules. By doing so it allows a website to generate more traffic by having a better chance of appearing on higher pages in search engines with their specific keywords. Although it can be a relatively expensive process, SEO is well worth the money, because it can lead many unique visitors to the webpage on a daily basis! The most important aspects of SEO are as follows:

Title

The website title is very important for the overall rankings of the webpage.  For instance the title is the first thing that is indexed by the search engine spiders, which has a dramatic impact on what the overall webpage is about.  If your title is different than the keywords used throughout the website it will not receive as high of a ranking as if the title were relevant to the content.  Another way to help increase the overall rankings of the site would be to have a domain name that is related to the contents of the site.  For instance, logo-apparel.com would be a great domain name for a website that deals with logo apparel.  By ensuring that the title and domain name are very similar to the keywords being expressed on the page, the webpage will have a much better chance of receiving higher rankings than if they were completely different. 

Content

The website must contain a lot of content that is related to the keywords being searched for if you want the page to be highly ranked in the search engine.  Content is one of the most important aspects of a search engine, because the search engine spiders check out and analyze the content to see how relevant it is to what is being searched.  The problem most people make is that they do not provide sufficient content in their sites and if there is a lot of content, it does not include enough info about the main keyword being specified on the page.  It is also very important that the content does not overuse the keyword for that page otherwise the search engine will consider it as spamming and could possibly ban the website from the search engine.  In order to make sure you list the keyword enough in the content, but not too much to where the spiders believe you are spamming then it is important to stay within a certain keyword density.  Keyword density is very easy to understand.  If there are 100 words on a page and 4 of them are keywords, then the keyword density is 4/100 or 4%.  In essence a good keyword density to stay within would be the 5-7% range.  This will help ensure that the engine does not consider the website to be spamming it!

Incoming/Outgoing Links

By far the most important thing related to SEO is the incoming links.  If you want to get high ratings then you need to try to get relevant and popular links coming into your website.  Outgoing links also help with rankings, but the incoming links are more important in respect.  Its important to realize that when creating outgoing links you should not include click here instead you should focus on something that is relevant to the main keyword in the page.  If your website was talking about search engine optimization then the link could be search engine optimization info.  This way the search engine spiders will take note to the link and this will help increase the keyword relevancy.

Generating Incoming Links

There are a variety of ways to get people to link to your website.  First of all make sure your website looks very professional, otherwise you will have a difficult time getting incoming links.  It is much easier to have someone link to you if you are already linked to them, so before making any contact with anyone make sure your site is linked to theirs.  After your website is linked to them, then you should write a personal message to the owners of the website you would like to link to and let them know you have linked to them.  This makes it more difficult to say no to someone, because you have already helped there website out!  On top of this you could also write articles on the web with your website link on it.  Many people today are looking for new information to provide their customers and this is a great one to get more people to your site, plus you can link these articles to yourself as well.  Giving people something for free in order to link to your website is another thing that could help persuade someone to link to you.

Alt Tags

Alt tags are another thing that is extremely important if the website has a lot of images in it.  Search engine spiders do not have the ability to analyze a picture or other things, such as flash players that may be on the website.  In order to give the spiders some idea of what they contain it is important to include an alt tag, which is a description of the image at hand.  With the alt tag displayed, the spider will be able to index the contents of the image which could help boost potential rankings of the website in the long run.

Conclusion

These are the best possible ways to increase the overall traffic of your website. By following the advice listed, you can gain an unparalleled advantage over the competition. These are the strategies we use to differentiate our site from the others by getting extremely high rankings on top search engines like Google and Yahoo.