SEO Basics
Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of making a web page (and consequently a whole site)
easier to find through search engine queries. Specifically, the main purpose of SEO is to make a
web page number one or as close to the top as it can possibly get in its own keyword or category.
Why SEO?
The simple answer is to increase website traffic. The more involved answer is to increase the
rank of a web page in a certain category. After the rank has been improved, there is an
expected rise in the page’s position in the results pages when a keyword related to the site’s
purpose has been queried. With the rise in the position, it is expected that people will
more easily find it. As a result, more people will visit the site, which brings us back
to the initial answer.
How to do SEO?
There are two acknowledged ways by which a web page may be optimized for search engines,
and these are keyword optimization and link building.
Keyword Optimization
Keyword optimization involves increasing the number of keywords in the web page’s code
and content so that the search engine ‘spider’ will ‘see’ the keywords, take note of
them, and deem the page to be relevant to these keywords. To illustrate, if there are
a lot of the term ‘basketball’ (as well as its variations), the search engine algorithm
will conclude that the site must be relevant to the sport ‘basketball’.
However, do be careful about using keywords. While the rule of thumb says having more
keyword and related keywords is best for SEO, search engines have begun to wise up to
spam pages – pages whose content are all keywords and are therefore no longer human-readable.
There are penalties for spamming your page. Be careful to stay within keyword density limits
to be safe.
Link Building
Actually, this is truly one-way link building or the process of posting links in other
web pages; these links, when clicked, should lead the user to your website.
Originally, links were just another way to direct traffic to a website. However, with
the advent of Google’s new PageRank algorithm, one-way links now influence a site’s status
with Google. That is, the more sites provide a link to a web page, the better the
ranking of that page should be. Furthermore, the categories of the sites on which the
links have been found also matter.
If a web page for a Caribbean hotel gives the site of a Caribbean tour and travel agency
a one-way link, the latter’s rank will get a significant boost. However, if a
Japanese electronics company gives this same site a one-way link, the site’s rank is
barely affected. The hotel is related to travels, but electronics is way off base.
It’s as simple as that.