SEO or SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

What is SEO?

Try to see yourself as a librarian, but not like a normal librarian who has been managing books in one library but instead, a librarian who has been managing all the books in the world. Many people are depending in you every single day to find that exact book that they need. Tough huh? So, how do you do it?

You are going to need a system. You would need to know what is written inside each and every book in the library and how each book relates to one another. Your system must also be capable to take in an exponential amount of information, and filter in the best answer for your readers’ questions. That is definitely not an easy job.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing are like the librarians of the World Wide Web. Their complex systems gather the information found in every web page on the internet so they can provide the data that the web searchers are looking for.

Every search engine has their top secret recipes to accurately filter out the information in the internet called an “algorithm”. Their unique algorithms are responsible for turning all the information on the internet to useful search results.

If you own a certain website, search results greatly matter. If your web page are ranked higher on the search engine results, people will find you and this will give you an opportunity to sell your products and services which in turn will be converted to profit. The main key to achieve higher rankings on search engines is by making sure that your websites contain the right amount of ingredients that the search engines need for their recipe. This process is called Search Engine Optimisation or usually referred as “SEO“.

Although search engines’ algorithms are kept secret, most of the big factors are known. Let’s take a look at the list:

1. Words – search engines account for every word found on the web. This way, when a person searches for “car parts”, the search engines automatically narrows the search results to web pages that talks about “car parts”.

2. Titles – Each web page on the internet has its own official title; we may never see it because it’s embedded in the codes, but they are there. Search engines scrutinize each page title because they usually summarize the whole content of the website, just like a book’s title.

3. Links between each websites – When a website links to another website, search engine usually interprets it as a recommendation by one reader telling other readers that this certain site has good and relevant information. A webpage that are recommended by many people has a lot of links coming to it. That looks very appealing to search engines.

However, some people does black hat SEO that try to deceive the search engines by generating or even buying bogus links from different websites and they set the links to point to their own web pages, this is referred to as “link farming”. Search engines can, most of the time, detect a site with a lot of suspicious links pointing towards them and they account for it by giving more weight on the links from authority sites. A site’s authority status is determined by its page rank (PR) – the higher a site’s PR is, the more authority it has.

4. Words that are being used in links or Anchor text – If your web page says “The best pizza in the world”, and the word “best pizza” is linked to www.pizzatoowoomba.com, search engines then establishes that www.pizzatoowoomba.com is related to the word “best pizza”. This way, when a person searches for “best pizza”, that site www.pizzatoowoomba.com will rank well.

5. Reputation – Websites with a consistent record of new, related, and engaging content, as well as a growing number of good quality links from authority sites are considered as rising stars and they will pretty well in the search engine rankings.

These are just the basic ingredients of for the search engines’ complex recipes but making sure that you have all these right elements could give you a good head start. Remember that the search engines’ algorithms are refined, updated, and changed all the time so make sure that you do your homework. SEO is like a never ending process, where you need to be constantly updated to keep up with the system.

The Purpose of SEO

The purpose of SEO is to get your pages listed in the search engines for your chosen keywords. SEO defines the terms you want your pages to rank for. Matt Cutts, Google spokesman, just put out a video stating, “SEO is not spam. SEO helps Google rank the pages properly.”

This quick guide will get you started in ‘helping Google’ rank your sites properly – at the top of the pack.

SEO success is primarily selecting good key words and using them wisely to get your page ranked. This is simple in concept but includes many factors that you do on the page itself as well as factors that come from off the page.

On page factors include using the key words in your post’s URL, title, description, meta-tags, category, and within the web page’s body text, even within images. Bolding or enclosing the terms in ‘heading’ tags on your page also brings attention to your key words.

Off-page factors include the back-links to your page, the anchor text of those back-links and the authority of the referring site. These back-links can be from blogs, social network, forum posts and from 3rd party directory listings. These are harder to control but worth the effort to obtain.

Remember: Google ranks pages – not web sites – and each page you publish increases your chances of high placement.

What is Local SEO?

Google’s recent focus on local search means localizing your terms is more important than ever. Local SEO is adding your locale to the keywords you target.

Instead of going after traffic in areas you cannot serve, localized searches bring you two benefits. If the user types in a search within your locale, your localized search terms should bring you automatic results since Google assumes location is important. If the user types in the city name, you have a possible 100% match.

Even though Google assumes location, you should still specify your business location. You can either let Google figure it out or you can tell them. The local modifiers, used in the URL, names, titles, tags can get you a 100% match when the full term is searched for – an extremely powerful combination. The external lead valves you create should also use the same localized keywords for linking back to your web site.