Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Introduction - What Is SEO How Search Engines Work Keywords – the Most Important Item in SEO Choosing the Right Keywords to Optimize For Keywords in URLs and File Names Keywords in Page Titles Keywords in Headings Metatags
Introduction - What Is SEO SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines.
How Search Engines Work Search engines use automated software programs knows as spiders or bots to survey the Web and build their databases. Web documents are retrieved by these programs and analyzed. Data collected from each web page are then added to the search engine index. When you enter a query at a search engine site, your input is checked against the search engine's index of all the web pages it has analyzed. The best urls are then returned to you as hits, ranked in order with the best results at the top.
Keywords – the Most Important Item in SEO Keywords are the most important SEO element for every search engine, they are what search strings are matched against. Choosing the right keywords to optimize for is thus the first and most crucial step to a successful SEO campaign. If you fail on this very first step, the road ahead is very bumpy and most likely you will only waste your time and money. There are many ways to determine which keywords to optimize for and usually the final list of them is made after a careful analysis of what the online population is searching for, which keywords have your competitors chosen and above all - which are the keywords that you feel describe your site best.
Choosing the Right Keywords to Optimize For For instance, If you have a site about dogs, do NOT try and optimize for the keyword "dog" or "dogs". Instead you could try and focus on keywords like "dog obedience training", "small dog breeds", "homemade dog food", "dog food recipes" etc. Success for very popular one-two word keywords is very difficult and often not worth the trouble, it's best to focus on less competitive highly specific keywords. Keywords in Special Places Keywords are very important not only as quantity but as quality as well – i.e. if you have more keywords in the page title, the headings, the first paragraphs – this counts more that if you have many keywords at the bottom of the page. The reason is that the URL (and especially the domain name), file names and directory names, the page title, the headings for the separate sections are more important than ordinary text on the page and therefore, all equal, if you have the same keyword density as your competitors but you have keywords in the URL, this will boost your ranking incredibly. a. Keywords in URLs and File Names b. Keywords in Page Titles c. Keywords in Headings
Meta tags Tags within a HTML document that help define the contents of a web page. Meta tags help allow Internet search engines display web pages more appropriately. Because the abuse of incorrectly describing a web page through meta tags, many search engines are no longer utilizing meta tags. Below is an example of some commonly used meta tags and their description. These lines of code would be placed between the <head></head> tags. <head> <title>Meta Tag - How Meta Tags Impact SEO & PPC</title> <meta name="description" content="Meta tags can have a larger impact on SEO and your website than you may think: find out more..." /> <meta name="keywords" content="meta tags,meta tag,meta tags seo,meta tags definition,what is a meta tag" /> <meta name="robots" content="index,follow" /> </head>
Visitors see this information in the following ways: Title Tag - This is the text you'll see at the top of your browser. Search engines view this text as the "title" of your page. Meta Keywords Attribute - A series of keywords you deem relevant to the page in question. Meta Description Attribute - A brief description of the page. Meta Robots Attribute - An indication to search engine crawlers (robots or "bots") as to what they should do with the page.