What is SEO ?
I don't know the exact figure; but it would be a fair estimate to suggest that upwards of 90% of visitors will arrive at your site via the search engines. In other words if you did nothing else except have your web site or blog just sit there on the server without promoting it, then you would have 90% less visitors!
The process of having your web site included (indexed) starts with the search engine spider "robot" downloading metadata from the <>< /head > section of pages and storing it on the search engine's own server. Later a second program called an "indexer" extracts certain information about the page which depending on the pages content such as; wordage, relevance and popularity (and many other important criteria ) are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at later dates.
As a site owner you can have tremendous influence over the behaviour of the whole process, in particular you need to have your site "optimized" to achieve amongst other things "high Ranking" in the SERPS so you can be easily found.
That in a nutshell is what SEO is all about. By optimizing your web site or blog it will enable you to be found more easily by people using the search engines and for you to compete effectively with the competition in your chosen subject/theme or field.
Bored already?
View my regular technology blog:
Make it or break it
Today's To-do list:
1. This is VERY IMPORTANT
(I will explain why later in more detail but for now please trust me on this)
After researching your niche market, you need to register a web site or blog with a URL having a highly related word or phrase included within it which MUST be relevant to the subject/theme of your WHOLE site! Example if your site is about tropical fish then something on the lines of tropicalfish.com or tropicalfishbreeding.com howtobreedtropicalfish.com you get the idea. By doing this you will immediately gain relevance and being relevant as mentioned already is very important. These days all the popular short and easy to remember URL's are gone, but actually the longer ones are more relevant - not memorable granted, but are better than the shorter ones so don't worry.
More on relevancy later as we go on.
2. Write your first page with relevancy
If you have not already done so, register your own free blog with Google's Blogger at: blogger.com. Alternatively if you already have a blog or web site with your relevant words or phrase in the URL then you can proceed to write your index page.
Search engines like content and in HUGE amounts but it must be relevant to your sites theme and it must be unique. Copying and pasting content is frowned upon by search engines so don't be tempted to do it. The best way for you to write content if your stuck or it doesn't come naturally is to do a little reading to gain inspiration. You will soon develop your own style of writing and you can always find articles and put your own spin on things.
Here is a contradiction:
I just said that search engines like lots of original content and above I put emphasis on the word "HUGE" but there is one single exception to this rule!
The exception being; the most important page on your site - Your "index" page.
That is usually the first page a visitor will arrive at otherwise known as the "Home page" example: yourwebsite.com/index.html. Your first post to a blog is also similar but is in date order i.e. your first post becomes archived. This first page is the most important and will provide relevancy to the rest of your site - it's like an introduction so guess what?
Your index page should have the "bare minimum" of content with the highest relevancy!
Yes you read correctly... "The bare minimum" of content with the exact relevant words/phrases together with a handful of related words with just ONE single anchored link (pointing to your next page) only. More words here will just dilute your sites overall relevancy.
This is the secret to relevancy!
A picture paints a thousand words!
OK maybe not a thousand exactly, but If you need to convey more information on your index page without sapping, then you should consider using images (with alt text) to get your message across. It is very easy to type some text into an image editor or screen capture and paste the image into your page - this will get the message across to visitors and help you concentrate your keywords without dilution. Use related words and phrases only which are likely to be searched for and avoid any words which are unlikely to be searched for.
BTW In the last paragraph... You have just read an image!
I will post a separate tutorial on internal links at a later date but for now please just edit your index page to provide just one single link pointing to your next page - which should be descriptively anchored like the following example:
< href="http://www.howtobreedtropicalfish.com/fishbreeding.html">How to breed tropical fish< /a>
< href="http://www.howtobreedtropicalfish.com/page2.html">Click HERE< /a> - just doesn't do it!
My next post: Lesson No.2
"Editing your 1st page source code for Search Engine optimization (SEO)"
(Hopefully in a few days time - BOOKMARK NOW!)
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