Search Engine Optimization 101

There is a lot to search engine optimization, so I am going to cover some basics and leave it at that. First let’s go over some key parts to SEO. Keywords are words that people use on the search engines to find your website. These keywords can help determine your rank on the search engines. This is why keyword research is a great way to assess which ones to use and which ones would be too difficult to rank with. There are some great tools out there for this research. One of the best to use is Google AdWords Keyword Tool, if you are looking for a free resource. If you are willing to pay for more options that will assist in this you can use SEOmoz’s Pro subscription. These keywords should be used in several different places such as: images, categories, header tags, title tags, URL, meta tags, and on your pages. These need to be specific to each page and need to be relevant. You don’t want to just be stuffing these keywords in and not having them at all related to what is on the webpage. The search engine crawlers will not be happy if you do this and this will result in you not ranking well. These crawlers are programs that will scan the web in a mathematical fashion and assess sites for where they rank. A great thing to add to your website is a sitemap plugin that will auto generate your sitemap. This gives a great road map to your website for the web crawlers to use. This shows that your website is search engine friendly.

An important fact to emphasize is that content is king. Your content is very important to SEO. You must be a resource to your website readers providing quality content, not just writing the content around the keywords. This is not to say that you cannot write the content with keywords in mind, but you must not make the keywords come before the quality of the content. If you write with the notion that the content is king, you will provide a great content for your website and therefore rank higher in the search engines. Another great way to be a resource and provide quality content is to provide information through social media. In other words, write articles, blogs and social network posts that provide useful tips and information to your audience. If you do this on a consistent basis and your followers share this information, you will become a well respected site and will in turn rank higher on the search engines. I cannot emphasize enough that consistency is very important.

It is also important to measure and track the stats of your website to assess the results of your efforts. This is done through installing analytics through a tool such as Google Analytics. This will give you demographics, keywords used, sources of traffic, repeat versus new visitors and so much more. Let me state that SEO is not a quick thing. It takes effort, patience and careful study to see results. But when the results happen, it is worth every bit of effort put into it.