Not too long ago, search engine optimization seemed like just another buzz-phrase to get company executives to pay through the nose for their new Internet ad campaign. Nowadays, SEO is pretty much standard for any website looking to actually make its presence known. If you’re a website owner looking to improve your profile or a business owner planning to set up an online presence, then learning search engine optimization tips and tricks is a great way to kick things off.
To start, let us define SEO. Search engine optimization originally covered a set of techniques for improving the quality of links returned by search engines. In other words, SEO was originally meant to help provide better-quality links for search engine users. However, due to the extremely competitive nature of marketing on the internet, marketers began turning these tools into their own.
Whereas a search engine uses SEO to refine its analyses and results, marketers and webmasters use SEO to make their websites rank higher in the search results. These cover different sets of techniques that work on the same principles – that of delivering what looks like good-quality links for the users that put in their queries.
The fundamental element of SEO is keywords. Keywords are simply words, or in some cases phrases, that relate to the topic or nature of the webpage. Nearly every word can be a keyword, reflecting the vast variety of topics and interests on the internet. However, different keywords will have different popularities, even if they are referring to the same things. “Diamonds” is a far more likely term than “sparkly clear jewels”, even though they essentially mean the same thing.
For marketers, choosing the right keywords to use requires research, which is now made easier by search engine companies releasing access to such research tools. More importantly though is the judicious insertion of the chosen keywords into the webpages of interest. Your website’s SEO lives or dies with the right research and application of keywords.
Another aspect that many new website owners overlook is metadata. Metadata is data describing the website or webpage that is not shown on-screen. In reality, it is easy to read and edit this data, but because it is not readily apparent, it is overlooked. Search engine components called crawlers or spiders access metadata in addition to the actual webpage content. When you can set your webpage’s metadata correctly, your webpage will get a significant boost in its rating.
Aside from its own value, a webpage’s value is also affected by how many other people value it, and one measure of this is the amount of linkage – or how many other webpages have links leading to the webpage in question. A large number of links leading to a webpage means that the target webpage contains valuable information as acknowledged by its popularity, because people share what they feel is helpful. Increasing the links leading to your webpage via affiliate marketers, partners, and other means is one way to get a massive SEO boost.
These are just at the tip of the iceberg; there are lots more search engine optimization tips!