What is SEO?
“How do I get on the first page of Google search results?” That’s a question that you and many business owners have asked. SEO means optimizing your website so that its relevance and value will be understood by search engines.
Good SEO doesn’t guarantee you position among the top five or ten search engine results, but it tends to dramatically improve your rank, which means that more users will find you among the search results.
How search engines work
How does a search engine learn about your website? How does it decide which websites to show in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)?
Search engines run one or more small programs called web crawlers (sometimes referred to as “spiders” or “robots”). A web crawler’s job is to travel from one page to another and another by following hyperlinks, a bit like a human user would do.
Search engines read through the HTML code on each page found by their crawlers. Text, DOM elements, and meta information all give clues as to how relevant a web page is to certain keywords, in other words, how likely a given web page is to satisfy a human user who provides a certain keyword phrase as a search engine query.
Search engines also get clues from the pages that link to yours. When a web crawler follows a hyperlink from another site and ends up on your site, the relevance and popularity of the referring site is an important indicator of the importance of your web pages.
What constitutes good SEO?
If you’ve spoken with SEOs before, you might have learned that there are perpetually changes in search engine optimization. Tactics that put webmasters on Google’s page one in 2007 or even last year might be ineffective now. Nevertheless, there are several principles that are and will always be fundamental to SEO. The landscape may change, but the laws of physics don’t.
These are some things that you can work on on your own:
Good content. Without a doubt, putting good text on your web pages is a fundamental requirement. Your pages should be rich in original, fresh content, which features keywords that are pertinent to your topic.
Admittedly, the dictum “content is king” is a bit of an exaggeration; indeed, avid use of search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing reveals sites with lousy content manage to get even top-10 positions. Even so, good textual content is essential to long-term high SERP rank.
Good user experience. Increasingly, search engines are actually paying attention to the experiences of real human users and altering their rankings accordingly. That means that you need to optimize your websites not just for web crawlers but also for humans. Give then pages that are easy to use and genuinely valuable.
When users come to your site from a search engine results page and then hit their browser’s “back” button to try another search engine result, it sends an important signal to the search engine. That’s called a “bounce,” and search engines will penalize your site for it.
Google, in particular, has take impressive steps (e.g. the +1 button and the Chrome browser) to gather information about users’ opinions of web sites.
Good code. There is a great deal that your HTML communicates to a search engine’s web crawler. Rich snippets, schemas, anchor and header tags, code order, externalizing scripts and stylesheets, and so forth are all ways to send signals to web crawlers.
Good site architecture. Your website is composed of more than a single web page (probably). Related pages should link to each other, and the most useful, most important, or most general pages should have links from the most pages.
You had better make it easy for either a spider or a human to navigate through the pages of your site to find the page with the content it wants.
Good sociability. Search engines place a great deal of weight on what sites link to your web pages. Ideally, backlinks should be from high-quality sites whose content is related in some way to your own. Links to your site should point to pages with the most useful content for the context of the hyperlink.