Seo: A Beginners’ Guide
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is a process of making a website achieve high ranking in the search engine – Google (as it is the most popular and most used search engine).
How to use it?
SEO is used by the sites that want their ranking to upgrade in Google. Using online keyword popularity tool like Overture and WordTracker, businesses can determine which keywords should be used in the text of your website. The ideal solution is to find a set of keywords or phrases that are frequently searched for but are not found on many websites.
Another thing, SEO is not just about keywords. Other important aspect is the PageRank. It is a Google-created attribute that reflects a page’s importance. For instance: your website will earn greater authority and importance if you have a higher PageRank. This will indirectly reflect in your ranking. Hence, to have a better rank in searches, it is advisable to have greater number of links from high PageRanked websites.
The Long Tail
To describe niche areas that receive greater traffic and interest than other mainstream areas – a specific term used when applied to SEO is a ‘Long Tail’. For instance, if you search “books”, you’ll end up getting vast results but, if you narrow down to ‘antique art books’, it will be a very less popular search. Hence, optimizing your website for such terms will render you to be on the top results. And further, people who have found your website through this search will end up getting interested in your content if they were just searching for books. This term becomes important while choosing your keywords and especially for smaller websites to survive and emerge as winners in the long run.
When should you do SEO?
The best time to start SEO is before you write the content of your website. The benefit involved here is to ensure to include the keywords you have targeted in your website content.
What you shouldn’t do?
SEO in the current world has become a big business. You’ll end up finding thousands of specialized businesses that are diverted to offer SEO alone. Many come up with bold promises of guaranteeing your website rank in top 10 Google searches. Do not get lured with such promises as you never know you are paying for a top 10 rank in search phrase that actually receives no traffic at all! Also be exceptionally careful of not trying and tricking search engines.
Best practice
To be a top ranking site, it is essential to consider SEO, but make sure you have a quality content based website. Though the variety of SEO strategies come and go, what remains is the one strategy of producing a good quality content. To illustrate the importance of this practice, it has been coined in one catchy phrase of virtual world – ‘Content is King’.
