Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about trying to increasing volume and quality of traffic to a website via search engines.
How Search Engines Work
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing, regularly crawl the web looking for new and updated pages to be added to their indexes of possible search results.
Every day millions of people sit down in front of their computers and use search engines. When they want to search for something, they go to the search site and type in words describing what they are looking for.
The search engine then checks its index to find web pages that match the query and ranks them according to visibility and the pages it determines are most relevant to the search.
Using SEO to Rank Higher on Google
There are a number of strategies to help get an article or website to the top of a Google search. They won’t guarantee it, however, chances are greatly improved.
- Getting other websites to link to the key pages on a website may improve visibility.
- Cross linking to key pages within the same website may improve ranking.
- Writing titles, content and subheadings that contain keywords in them will improve searchability.
- Ensuring relevant keywords are used in the web page’s meta data. This is hidden information that doesn’t show up on the page itself, but in the code used to construct the page. This meta data is found by search engines and used to help describe and categorize the web page’s contents.
Tips for Creating an SEO-Friendly Web Page
While an article writer or web page creator has little control over other websites linking back to their page, they have plenty of control over the keywords used in their page’s content … unless owners use link building service providers.
Picking out good keywords for a page can be likened to advertisers selecting a target audience to market to.
Begin with a list of 10 keywords that are relevant to the article or web page. Then, research which phrases the end-users are putting into the search boxes by visiting whatever tools are available from the search engine (For example, the Google <href=”#search.none”>AdWords Keyword Tool).
Start expanding on the keywords list, bearing in mind who you want to read the page and what the key themes in the contents are. Once the keywords are established, it’s important to not just put them into the meta data, but to also use them frequently in the main body content, in the title and subheadings of the web page they have been selected for.
Use SEO to Stand Out From the Competition
It’s important to take competition into account. If there are too many possible search results for the chosen keywords, there may be too many competitors to achieve a high enough ranking to be worth while.
To find out if the keywords chosen are overly used, simply go to Google, enter the words in the search box and look at how many results show up. For example, if ‘wedding’ has 291,000,000 results or more, but ‘cheap wedding venues auckland’ has 75,400, it’s going to be easier to get a higher ranking for the latter search.
If using Google AdWords as a source of revenue (a pay-per-click system that use a page’s keywords to generate relevant advertising), it will also be important to pay attention to the CPC, or cost per click rate. This is how much Google pays if an end user clicks on that advertisement, so it makes sense to choose keywords that will be profitable.