SEO is a short for Search Engine Optimization. It is a process that webmasters use to make improvements to their website which will increase its visibility to search engines. The more visible your pages are in search results, the better your chances of gaining attention of those people making the searches and then getting more customers as a result.
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The Basics of Search Engines
A search engine is a place people go to for answers. They search the world wide web, and go through countless content, using a range of factors to determine if the content relates to your search. Search engines discover content and catalogue it by crawling it and indexing it. The content is then ordered by how well it matches queries in a process which is called “ranking”.
Organic search results are when results appear through searches because of effective SEO. Organic searches are not achieved with paid advertising, they come up in a search because the search engines feel they match the search best. The search engine results pages or “SERPs” are what we see when we do a search along with countless ads. Search engines make their money from ads, so you will see many ads on every result too.
There are seven steps for successful SEO and those are (in order of importance):
1. 1. Making your website accessible
for search engines to be able to crawl it and index it.
2.
Creating content that is
compelling enough that it will attract queries from searches.
3.
Optimizing keywords so that it
will attract searches and search engines.
4.
Providing the best experience
for users with a site that loads quickly.
5.
Content that users share on
social media, earns links and goes viral with shares.
6.
The tags and keywords contained
in the title, URL and page description work to increase the click through rate
and increase page rankings.
7.
Has a snippet that helps it to
stand apart from other websites in the search engine result pages.
Why is SEO Important?
Traffic can be generated to your website through many avenues, including social media, advertising and various platforms online. Most of the online traffic that is driven to your website comes through search engines. The organic search results take up more space on the search engine pages when results come in and look for credible to searchers, receiving more clicks than paid ads. SEO provides twenty times more opportunity for traffic than PPC on desktop and mobile platforms.
When SEO is set up properly it continues to pay dividends into the future. If you have a quality content page that has ranked naturally for certain keywords, the traffic to your site will continue to increase over time, but traffic needs to be continually funded to get traffic to your website. Although search engines continue to become more intelligent, they still need plenty of help from those who create websites. When your website is optimized, it helps the search engines by delivering better information which in turn, is indexed properly by the search engines and then displayed in the search results.
Do I Need to Hire a Professional for SEO?
If you are ready to learn all there is to know about SEO, then you can go ahead and try to set up a website yourself. You may find, however, that it is best to hire someone to help you because there is a lot to know and if you get something wrong it could affect your search engine results and ranking for a long time to come.
SEO – What is “Black Hat” and “White Hat”?
When it comes to SEO there is what is called “Black Hat” as well as “White Hat” techniques. The white had techniques are the best strategies that follow the rules of the search engines and focus on offer actual value to live people. Black hat SEO is a suite of strategies and techniques that try to fool the search engines into sending traffic to a website. Many of these techniques are now outdated and will harm a website – think of insidious practices such as keyword stuffing where a certain keyword or phase is stuffed into content repeatedly to the point of ridiculousness, making the content useless and unreadable.
Black hat SEO methods still can work but this puts your website at risk of being penalized or de-indexed (complete removal from search results). There are also certain ethical implications to black hat SEO methods. Websites that are penalized disappear from the search engines, never to be seen again. This can have serious implications for businesses if they are relying on that website for their livelihood.
Search engines want honest people to succeed. Google offers an SEO starter guide so that you can get a better idea of the process. Google also has a Help Forum for Webmasters and hosts live hangouts. The main thing to remember is not to be devious and trick search engines or you will pay. You should always think about the potential visitors to your website and ensure that they always have the optimal online experience. Google has some guidelines that everyone should consider:
Basic Principles:
- · Pages should be made for users,
not search engines.
- · Never try to deceive your
visitors/users.
- ·Do not use tricks which are
meant to increase search engine rankings.
- ·Consider what it is that makes a website valuable, unique and engages users.
What to Avoid:
·
Content that is “generated”
through apps and other “content generators”
·
Adding your website into link
farms.
·
Creating a web page that does
not contain any original content.
·
Cloaking – where you show the
search engines one thing and show your visitors different content.
·
Links and texts that are
hidden.
·
Pages created to rank well for
a certain search and direct traffic to your site – also known as a doorway
page.
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