Contents
SEO Basics
How Search Engines Work
How to Choose Keywords for SEO
How to Optimize Your Site for SEO
How to Optimize Your HTML for SEO
How to Optimize Page Content for SEO
How to Get Links to Your Website
How to Get Your Website Included in
Directories and Search Engines
How to Assess the Success of
Your SEO Campaign
SEO Tactics to Avoid
Learn more with these titles from Barnes & Noble
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- Understand the inner workings of search engines and SEO
- Choose the best keywords to boost your search rankings
- Structure your HTML and page content for SEO
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SEO Basics
If you own or manage a website, chances are that you could benefit from search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is an essential component of virtually every successful website, and, for that matter, most modern businesses.
What Is SEO?
In the simplest terms, SEO is the process of fine tuning certain aspects of a website to make the site “search
engine friendly.” A search engine–friendly website is one that has been optimized to increase the likelihood that users of search engines (such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live) will find the site when seeking the type of content or service that the site offers.
Why Use SEO?
A typical internet search can return tens of thousands of search results, which by default are displayed in sets of 10 or so per page. The purpose of SEO is to make a site appear higher in the search results list than competing sites. Sites that ignore SEO altogether often appear very low in search results or don’t appear at all. The ultimate goal of every SEO strategy is to make a site appear:
- On the first page of the search results on popular search engines
- As close as possible to the top of the list on that page
Though the changes that SEO requires are often minor and highly nuanced, they can have a major impact on the prominence, and thus the popularity and success, of a website.
Benefits of SEO
An effective SEO campaign produces a greater return on investment than virtually any other form of marketing. The main benefit of SEO is increased traffic to your site, which can lead to:
- Improved brand recognition: The more people that see your website, the more entrenched your brand name will become.
- Increased sales: If your website offers a product or service, more visitors means more sales.
- Increased advertising revenue: If your website features advertising campaigns, such as Google AdSense ads, an affiliate program, or standard ”banner” ads, more visitors will help your site earn more ad revenue.
- A larger audience: If your site’s primary purpose is to disseminate information, the more visitors you have to your site, the better.
Does SEO Really Work?
Search engine companies don’t disclose exactly how their software finds and ranks websites, so no one can say definitively whether a certain SEO tactic really works. In addition, because search engine companies are constantly fine-tuning their software, SEO methods that once seemed foolproof can be rendered ineffectual overnight. Even so, a consensus—as well as an entire industry—has arisen predicated on the notion that several universal SEO techniques do actually work. This guide explains those methods and describes how to implement them.
SEO Campaigns
The process of making a website search engine friendly is known as an SEO campaign. To maximize the effectiveness of your SEO efforts, you’ll need to implement every stage of a typical SEO campaign. The following is an overview of these stages, each of which is covered in detail later in this guide.
1. Choose Effective Keywords
Keywords are the words in your site’s page content and HTML code that match the search terms that users enter into search engines. The keywords that you choose to emphasize throughout your site can have a direct impact on your site’s position in search engine results pages and, therefore, on the traffic that your site receives. (For more on keywords, including how to choose the best ones for your site, see How to Choose Keywords for SEO.)
2. Optimize Your Website
SEO also involves making global and structural changes to your website: everything from choosing an effective domain name to creating a logical naming scheme for your web
pages. (For details on the specific steps you can take to optimize your site, see How to Optimize Your Site for SEO.)
3. Optimize Your HTML
HTML is the predominant markup language used to create web pages. It consists of text content contained within tags: for instance, the HTML title tag <title> contains the title of the page, which most browsers display near the top of the browser window. Search engines examine the contents of certain HTML tags to determine how to classify the pages they’re crawling. (For more guidance on how to optimize your site’s HTML, see How to Optimize Your HTML for SEO.)
4. Optimize Your Page Content
In addition to examining the content of specific HTML tags, crawlers also analyze how you present your content to readers. For instance, the keywords that appear throughout your pages and the order in which you arrange your content can affect how crawlers index your site. (For more specific guidance on how to present your content for SEO, see How to Optimize Page Content for SEO.)
5. Get Links and Directory Listings
Search engines favor sites that other sites link to and that appear in prominent web directories—lists of sites that are put together manually. (For more information on links and directories, see How to Get Links to Your Website and How to Get Your Website Included in Directories and Search Engines.)
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