Understanding the SEO Process
Once you have developed and published your web site or blog, most of the visitors that land on your page will have done so coming from a search engine result in which your site popped up. The visitor had started his/her journey to your site by first typing their query into the search engine site and that engine displayed the results to them from the indexed web sites that are relevant to what that user had searched. Optimizing a site for these search engines will bring you more traffic and potentially more business and help your site to achieve better rankings in the various major search engines.
So what exactly is SEO? SEO refers to various methods and tactics that a web site builder, designer or owner can use and apply to their web site in order to increase the traffic, rank, and the visibility in search results. A good SEO strategy has been proven time and again to land a web site at the top of the results of the major search engines which in turn will increase the traffic to your site. It is shown the results that are on the front page, and top visible results are almost always the sites that get the clicks. The results that you see from a search are known as “organic” search results, and these are the results that hold the most weight because users tend to trust a “organic” result rather than a paid AD.
So let’s take a look at the relations between SEO and the undisputed king of search, Google.
Ever since the launch of Google search, SEO became a bit more complex. Google’s search was developed with better and more accurate results in mind and an over all better user experience. It was also designed with the intention of weeding out under hand tactics such as “keyword stuffing”. After a while, Google started to redefine the search technology by including more factors for the indexing and ranking of sites.
The correct use of search engine optimization techniques help get your web site to the top of the results. Proper SEO actions are known as “white hat” SEO. These are proven to drive more traffic to your web site and in turn produce a higher ranking within the search engine. So on the flip side of that coin, the misuse of search engine optimization techniques will have a very negative impact on the web sites ranking and indexing as well as possibly get the site banned from showing up in the results. These are the SEO methods you should stay away from.
So in closing with, with the massive amount of web sites, blogs and other content being added to the web every single day, getting visibility for your web site is ever increasingly becoming much harder. Which is more of a reason to continue to optimize your site a necessary requirement. Staying on top of doing so will ensure that you maintain a good indexing and ranking. It is absolutely essential to include an SEO plan into your strategy not only AFTER your site is already online, but as you are developing and planning your site. A good plan has SEO in mind in the brainstorming phase of your web design.
You can easily find a lot of sites and articles that cover the topic of search engine optimization. But just reading these articles alone will not give you all the knowledge that is required to have a full understanding of the SEO process. Articles like mine and the hundreds of thousands of others online will provide tips and points of view, but it is always a good idea to use a structured guide coupled with a lot of real life experience. But be sure to always cross research the information that you find. There is a lot of bad information on SEO that can end with all your hard work being removed, having your rankings dropped and creating a negative impact on your websites reputation. So be careful what you employ in your strategy.
Thank you for sticking around and reading. I do hope that this first article has been helpful and that future articles will be just as useful. Please be sure to let me know how I am doing, what I can do to better help you, any information that you would like to know, or any other feed back that will prove useful to you as well as other users.