About SEO:
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to techniques that help your website rank higher in organic (or “natural”) search results, thus making your website more visible to people who are looking for your product or service via search engines.
SEO is part of the broader topic of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), a term used to describe all marketing strategies for search. SEM entails both organic and paid search. With paid search, you can pay to list your website on a search engine so that your website shows up when someone types in a specific keyword or phrase. Organic and paid listings both appear on the search engine, but they are displayed in different locations on the page.
So, why is it important for your business‟ website to be listed on search engines? On Google alone, there are over 694,000 searches conducted every second. I Think about that. Every second that your website is not indexed on Google, you are potentially missing out on hundreds, if not thousands of opportunities for someone to visit your website, read your content, and potentially buy your product or service. Practicing SEO basics, as well as more advanced techniques after those, can drastically improve your website’s ability to rank in the search engines and get found by your potential customers.
SEO ranking (search engine optimization ranking) refers to a webpage’s position in search engines’ organic search results for a given search query. If your page is higher in search results, more people are likely to see it. Which means more people may visit your site.
For example, look at Google’s top search results for the keyword “best gaming chairs.”
The first two results are paid ads. After that, one of PC Gamer’s pages holds the No. 1 organic result. This means PC Gamer has the No. 1 SEO rank on this particular search engine results page (SERP).
Because the sole purpose of a search engine is to provide you with relevant and useful information, it is in everyone’s best interest (for the search engine, the searcher, and you) to ensure that your website is listed in the organic search listings. In fact, it is probably best to stay away from paid search all together until you feel you have a firm grasp on SEO and what it takes to rank organically.
How Search
Engine will work:
Type a word or phrase into a search box and click a (search) button. Wait a few seconds, and references to thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of pages will appear. Then all you have to do is click through those pages to find what you want. But, what exactly is a search engine, It’s a little complicated. On the back end, a search engine is a piece of software that uses applications to collect information about web pages.
The information collected is usually key words or phrases that are possible indicators of what is contained on the web page as a whole, the URL of the page, the code that makes up the page, and links into and out of the page. That information is then indexed and stored in a database.
On the front end, the software has a user interface where users enter a search term — a word or phrase — in an attempt to find specific information. When the user clicks a search button, an algorithm then examines the information stored in the back-end database and retrieves links to web pages that appear to match the search term the user entered.
Search engines have one objective – to provide you with the most relevant results possible in relation to your search query. If the search engine is successful in providing you with information that meets your needs, then you are a happy searcher. And happy searchers are more likely to come back to the same search engine time and time again because they are getting the results they need. In order for a search engine to be able to display results when a user types in a query, they need to have an archive of available information to choose from.
Every search engine has proprietary methods for gathering and prioritizing website content. Regardless of the specific tactics or methods used, this process is called indexing. Search engines actually attempt to scan the entire online universe and index all the information so they can show it to you when you enter a search query.
about the
process of collecting web information:
The process of collecting information about web pages is performed by an agent called a crawler, spider, or robot. The crawler literally looks at every URL on the Web, and collects key words and phrases on each page, which are then included in the database that powers a search engine. Considering that the number of sites on the Web went over 100 million some time ago and is increasing by more than 1.5 million sites each month, that’s like your brain cataloging every single word you read, so that when you need to know something, you think of that word and every reference to it comes to mind.
It is not difficult to get your website to index and even rank on the search engines. However, getting your website to rank for specific keywords can be tricky. There are essentially 3 elements that a search engine considers when determining where to list a website on the SERP: rank, authority, and relevance.
Rank:
Rank is the position that your website physically falls in on the SERP when a specific search query is entered. If you are the first website in the organic section of the SERP (don’t be confused by the paid ads at the very top), then your rank is 1. If your website is in the second position, your rank is 2, and so on. As discussed previously in How Search Engines Work, your rank is an indicator of how relevant and authoritative your website is in the eyes of the search engine, as it relates to the search query entered.
Tracking how your website ranks for a specific keyword over time is a good way to determine if your SEO techniques are having an impact. However, since there are so many other factors beyond your control when it comes to ranking, do not obsess over it. If your website jumps 1-5 spots from time to time, hat’s to be expected. It’s when you jump 10, 20, 30 spots up in the rankings that it makes sense to pat yourself on the back.
Authority:
As previously discussed in the How Search Engines Work section, search engines determine how authoritative and credible a website’s content is by calculating how many inbound links (links from other websites) . However, the number of inbound links does not necessarily correlate with higher rankings. The search engines also look at how authoritative the websites that link to you are, what anchor text is used to link to your website, and other factors such as the age of your domain.
You can track over time how authoritative your website is by monitoring a few different metrics. There are a variety of tools to help you keep track.
Relevance:
Relevance is a one of the most critical factors of SEO. The search engines are not only looking to see that you are using certain keywords, but they are also looking for clues to determine how relevant your content is to a specific search query. Besides actual text on your web pages, the search engines will review your website’s structure, use of keywords in your URLs, page formatting (such as bolded text), and what keywords are in the headline of the webpage versus those in the body text. While there is no way to track how relevant your website is, there are some SEO basics you can practice to cover your bases and make sure you are giving the search engines every possible opportunity to consider your website. We’ll get to that in just a bit.
Search engines are extremely complex. Bottom line: the search engines are trying to think like human beings. It is very easy to get caught up in modifying your website’s content just so you rank on the search engines. When in doubt, always err on the side of providing relevant and coherent content that your website’s audience (your prospects) can digest. If you find yourself doing something solely for the search engines, you should take a moment to ask yourself why.
In order to get your website’s content to rank on the search engines, you need to take the path of least resistance. Although trying to rank for highly trafficked keywords and terms may seem like a logical approach, it will most likely lead to a lot of frustration and wasted resources. Also, even if you end up getting traffic from these types of keywords, chances are the quality of the traffic will be low due to disinterest in what you specifically have to offer.
Think of every search query as being like a snow flake - they are all different. There are billions more unique search queries than there are generic ones. In fact, if you were to add up all search engine traffic that comes from the most popular keywords, it would not even come close to the amount of traffic that comes from searches using those more unique queries. This is called the theory of the long-tail.
Keyword
optimization:
A critical component of SEO is choosing the right keywords for optimization. If you sell shoes, you may want your website to rank for “shoe store,” (a head term), but chances are you are going to have some trouble there. However, if you optimize multiple pages on your website for each specific pair of shoes that you sell, you are going to have much more success and it will be easier to rank on the SERP. A keyword like “red tennis shoes with Velcro” (a long-tail keyword or term) is a good example. Sure, the number of people that search for this keyword will be much lower than the number that search for “shoe store,” but you can almost bet that those searchers are much farther down the sales funnel and may be ready to buy. Using keywords web pages you have, the higher your chances are of ranking in the search engines.
As you already know, the search engines are smart. If you create multiple web pages about the same exact topic, you are wasting your time. You need to create lots of content that covers lots of topics. There are multiple ways you can use content to expand your online presence and increase your chances of ranking without being repetitive.
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