To understand how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) works, you need to understand the basics that make up for a good optimization of websites for search engines. In this post, you would get to know the basics about search engine optimization and how you can start applying it to your blog as soon as possible
Search Engine Optimization Basics
Search Engine
Search engines basically gather data about every website they can find. Search engines send out little helpers called “spiders” that crawl the net and store information about everything that they find. The search engines then rank the websites in order of importance, based on a variety of factors. They also penalize and reward websites, based on what they find.
The important factors search engine takes into consideration on websites includes;
– Number and quality of backlinks
– Freshness of content
– Uniqueness of content
– “Authority” status
– Age
Webmasters goal then is to provide the search engines a website that appears valuable to them, so we can achieve a high ranking which will, in turn, bring us traffic. Examples of such search engines are Google, Bing, Yahoo, MSN, Ask etc
Domain Names
Choosing a good domain name for SEO is very important. Your domain name is the name for your business. I strongly suggest that you should not rush into a domain name. Take your time to brainstorm a few possibilities and choose the perfect domain name. A few things to keep in mind when choosing a domain name includes;
– .com is the best extension you should choose
– Your domain name should be easy to remember
– It should represent the content of your website
– Short names with two words are the best e.g. life tips
– Don’t use numbers and/or hyphens
– Limit the words in your domain name to between 15 and 20
Keyword Research
If you aren’t doing proper keyword research before you build and expand your website, you are directly keeping web pages from becoming popular. Just writing on your niche isn’t enough, you need to be spending time researching and discovering the best keywords to target in your posts.
Keyword research involves finding keywords that have a reasonable amount of searches per month and a reasonably low amount of competition on the internet for that keyword/phrase. It is your job to avoid keywords with too much competition and keywords with too little search volume.
There are various keyword research tools you can use to conduct a keyword search. You can either search for the term “Keyword Research Tools” using our search box or go to Google.com to search for the same term. You will get more information about the tools you can use.
Title Tags
One more important aspect of websites is the title tag. When creating a webpage, the title tag is a single phrase that represents what your page is about. Search engines look to the title tag to understand what the page is about, and it is important that you use it as a way to communicate it to the search engines as clearly as you can.
The title tag for each page can be found towards the top of each HTML page that you create, between the
Meta Tags
Meta tags are used to give the search engines additional information about each page of your website. It is important to understand that this information is only seen by the search engines and not your actual visitors. The meta tags also appear towards the top of each page, between
the < / head>< head> tags.
The most important meta tags include:
– Description Meta Tag: This tag gives you a chance to describe what your page is about. It can be longer than the title. Here is an example of the syntax:
– Keywords Meta Tag: This tag gives you a chance to list several keywords that are found and discussed on your page. Here is an example of the syntax:
– Robots Meta Tag: This tag is an example to tell the search engines if you don’t want them indexing or sending spiders to a section of your website. By default, search engines spider everything, so you will only use this tag if you want to keep them away from some pages. Here is an example of the syntax:
