My Town Tutors is a great resource for parents & teachers. Find qualified tutors in your area today!
July Jokes / July Hashtags / Top July Pages / July Guest Blogs
Search engine optimization can sound like a scary task, especially if you’re not a particularly technical person. However, you shouldn’t be overly intimidated by the prospect. Many people have learned how to optimize their sites who don’t otherwise possess a high level of technical expertise.
The secret lies in learning the terms and what they stand for. This article will cover the major terms involved in SEO, what they mean, and how you can use them. For the more complicated analytics of SEO, it would be wise to use a professional service such as the Mellow Promo company. The basics, however, aren’t actually that complicated. And even if you do use a professional service it is helpful to understand the mechanisms behind SEO.
What is SEO?
The first thing you should learn is what SEO is. SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the mechanism by which Google and other search engines rate the quality of your site and decide where it should stand on search engine results pages (SERPs). The more essential components you have aligned with SEO rules, the higher up your page will rank on SERPs.
How does SEO work?
Indexing
Indexing is the process by which Google reads, analyzes, and stores the information on your site. Each index entry includes the URL and content description for any given page.
Web crawlers
Web crawlers are the instruments by which Google fishes out pages and indexes them. It does this by means of automated processes that “crawl” the web looking for sites. There are different mechanisms by which crawlers find information. Following links, reading sitemaps, and other processes are followed as crawlers find and compile their results.
What can you do to improve your ranking?
There are several key elements that you should pay attention to in order to keep your ranking high. They include the following:
Keywords – Keywords are words that best describe the content of a given site or page. Different industries, genres, etc have their own keywords that are common among them, so you should familiarize yourself with the keywords that are popular among your competitors and see which ones might apply to your website.
Note that the different pages of any given site might have completely different keywords on them. In creating your site, you should ensure that keywords match the subheadings of your various site pages. If you are selling clothing, for example, you want the keywords on the pages for shirts, pants, etc to be relevant to their respective pages, not just the clothing industry in general.
You should also keep in mind that keywords should be utilized in the appropriate number. You should have just the right amount of them so that your text flows well and doesn’t sound overdone. Crawlers can detect the phenomenon of “keyword stuffing,” or adding too many keywords, and your site will be downgraded if you do this.
Content – Aside from the keywords that you include in your site, it is also important that your overall content be optimized. What this means is that your paragraphs, title headings, and URL headings should be appropriately written.
Your content should use the kind of language that is appropriate to your industry, be of appropriate length, and sound appealing to your target audience. It would be to your benefit to study the language of your competitors to understand the tone that leading industry players are using. You can then refine the language to fit your own business appropriately.
Links and backlinks – In addition, you should carefully construct the links that will be on your page. This applies both to the links that you add yourself, as well as the ones that come from other sites to yours. The links that you add should lead to businesses or other entities that have logical connections to yours. You should check regularly to ensure that the sites are functioning properly and that their own rankings are still strong. If you link to sites that have become downgraded, your own ranking will suffer as a result.
There are also links that connect other sites to yours. These are known as backlinks. Backlinks are an important component of your SEO as they indicate other businesses’ desire to be connected to yours. To check your backlinks, you might need the help of a professional service, but it is worthwhile to do so as understanding your backlinks is a key element to keeping your site strong and ranking high.
Repeated efforts make for improved results
As you go about the process of optimizing your site on a regular basis, it will get less difficult with time. You should be conscientious about keeping up the process on a regular basis, though, as search engines’ standards and algorithms change frequently. Also, keywords come into and fall out of fashion, so you want to make sure that you are always using the ones that will be most to your benefit.