As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content, HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of inbound links is another SEO approach.
Why a website does needs SEO?
The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines - Google, Bing and Yahoo. Although social media and other types of traffic can generate visits to your website, search engines are the primary method of navigation for most Internet users.
Search engines are unique in that they provided targeted traffic - people looking for what you offer. If your site cannot be found by search engines or your content cannot be put into their databases, you miss out on incredible opportunities available to websites provided via search.
Search queries, the words that users type into the search box, carry extraordinary value. Experience has shown that search engine traffic can make an organization's success. Targeted visitors to a website can provide publicity, revenue, and exposure like no other channel of marketing. Investing in SEO, whether through time or finances, can have an exceptional rate of return compared to other types of marketing and promotion.
Search engines are smart, but they still need help. Search engine optimization is necessary. However, there is a limit to how search engines can operate. Whereas the right SEO can net you thousands of visitors and attention, the wrong moves can hide or bury your site deep in the search results where visibility is minimal.
In addition to making content available to search engines, SEO also helps boost rankings so that content will be placed where searchers will more readily find it. The Internet is becoming increasingly competitive, and those companies who perform SEO will have a decided advantage in visitors and customers.
SEO Tips
SEO is not a big deal; you can learn it easily and can do it by yourself for your site. Follow the list bellow for SEO Techniques:Domain & File Names:
Choose your site domain name that contains words from your primary keyword phrase. Your domain name should also be easy to spell and easy to remember. For example I use the file name top-5-freelancing-sites for my last article.Keyword Phrases:
1. Use keywords that are being searched for.2. Add keyword synonyms to your content.
3. Put the keyword phrases in the <title>keyword phrase</title>.
4. Insert the keyword phrases in a <h1>keyword phrase</h1> tag at the beginning of your page. Keyword synonyms should be put in your h2 & h3 tags. The h1, h2, h3 tags are used for titles and subtitles in articles.
5. Make sure you use your keyword phrases from the page you are linking to, in your anchor text on the site map. i.e., Top 5 Freelancing Sites.
Keyword Density:
Keyword density is a very important part of search engine optimization. Keyword density is the percentage of your keyword or keyword phrase in your web page text. You may want to look that your competition to see what keyword density they are using. Too high a keyword density will be considered search engine spam and can get you blacklisted.Your keywords should be in the top of your page and in either every paragraph or every second paragraph depending on your paragraph length.
Bad Techniques:
Bad search engine optimization techniques can also get you blacklisted from a search engine. Some techniques that are considered spam are cloaking, invisible text, tiny text, identical pages, doorway pages, refresh tags, link farms, filling comment tags with keyword phrases only, keyword phrases in the author tag, keyword density to high, mirror pages and mirror sites.While these techniques might work to give you a higher ranking for short time in the long run they will hurt you.
Title and Meta Description Tag:
Construction of your title tag is one of the most important things you need to do. Each page should have a different title with 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning. When search engine results are displayed the title is the first thing people see.Below the title is a description which will be either be taken from your Meta name description content="Description phrase" or from the first sentence on at page. Your description should also have 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning as so should your first sentence. You should have a different title, description and first sentence on each page.
Meta Keywords Tag:
The meta keywords tag is not as relevant as it used to be and some say Google doesn't ever look at it anymore, but put it in anyway. It is as follows, <meta name="keywords" content="keywords,go,here" /> and put in it all your keywords and keyword phrases. This tag should be different for each page.Author and Robots Tags:
The Author Tag should contain the name of the company that owns the site. This tag will help you get a #1 position for your company's name.<meta name="author" content="Solutions with Service" />
Use a generic Robots Tag on all pages that you want indexed. This instructs the robots to crawl the page. The following is the generic robots tag.
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
Quality Content:
Quality content is also plays an important role in SEO. Quality content will bring people back and as people always want to tell others about a good thing it will get you forward links from other sites. Your content should be written with your keyword phrases in mind.Quantity Content:
The more the better. Just remember your content will need to be both quantity and quality.Avoid Dynamic URLs:
Are you pages via php, asp, or cf? Some search engines may have a problem indexing them. Create static pages whenever possible. Avoid symbols in your URLs like the "?" that you will often find in php, asp or cf pages.Static pages are the best but if you have a db driven site, make sure the menu and site map like go to inventory.cfm not inventory.cfm?vn=0 .
Site Map:
A good menu system is really a site map. A well constructed menu system that is on each page and contains a link to very page on the website is all you need.Site Themes:
All of the top 3 search engines look for site themes or a common topic when they creep a website. If your site is about one specific topic you will rank better than if you have more than one theme or topic on your site. By using similar keyword phrases in each page the search engines will detect a theme this will be to your advantage.Site Design:
You may think, what site design has to with search engine optimization? Well if your website has a bad color scheme that is hard to read, is not organized, is a cheesy looking site, then all your site optimization has been a waste of time. Make your site attractive to the viewer, make things easy to find, have you graphic header and menu bar the same place on each page.These things will keep your visitors on the site and bring them back. A well optimized site with a high search engine results position that is ugly and is hard find information on, will not keep the visitors your optimization has brought to the site.