What is SEO & how does it work? (part one) Craig Murray DigitalAn Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how it works

When it comes to internet marketing the term SEO is probably the first thing that lecturers or marketing people are going to mention to you. But what is SEO? Many people use the term without actually having an idea of how it works or what it actually does for your website. A lot of people use the term but do not know how to implement or where to begin with SEO. A lot of people will call themselves “Gurus” or “Experts” but when it comes to SEO everyone can have their own tips and tricks to succeeding with it, however there are a lot of fundamentals that everyone should know when getting started.  SEO is a process used in online marketing to organically or naturally improve the visibility of the website on a search engine. The main reason behind this is to drive more traffic to the website so the higher ranked the website is on the search engines the more likely people will visit it over the lower ranked websites. This is great not only for exposure and building business but also compared to PPC you do not need to Pay each time someone clicks on your website.

There are many tactics used to help the SEO ranking of a website. Content is “King” when it comes to SEO and within that content you need to position the “Keyword” of the service or product you are trying to rank for. It is also important to have the HTML of the website done properly, making use of Meta tags, description tags and title tags. Also make sure that your site runs fast. A great site to use to see how well your website performs is http://www.webpagetest.org. Most of the results from web page test are for server side changes and you can have your webmaster or host make these changes. Just email them. There are also various tactics to improve your ranking on search engines.

How search engines work and see websites for SEO

Search engines see your website in text format. They do not take into account how well designed or how great your website looks. When it comes to ranking of websites, search engines perform the following steps to see the relevancy of the website to calculate its ranking for a keyword; crawling, indexing, processing, relevancy calculation, along with retrieving.

These steps are done in that particular order by the search engine. In short how the process works is search engines send out spiders or crawlers which crawl through the websites from one page to another indexing everything they find. The details that are gathered are indexed into a database; this step describes the website and stores it. The information stored is then processed and the relevancy of the website is then calculated. Then there are some technical processing that goes looking into the algorithms and what not to establish the ranking and retrieving is just showing that on the search engine. It is important to have a sitemap.xml on your website to help with the spiders crawling and fully indexing your website.

The process of how search engines decide ranking is quite technical but in order to have a proper optimized website it is important to know which keywords you are looking to highlight in your website and use those. Also do keep in mind that the spiders or crawlers are not able to gather information from any flash content or Java script so websites that are completely flash based cannot be optimized, HTML websites are recommended if you are looking to get proper optimization done on your website.

How to properly optimize your website (Do’s and Don’ts’)

Now that you know what search engines look for when it comes to ranking you can follow the following steps to optimize your website properly. We know that search engines look at the content, performance of the website, along with user experience. At the same time the following should be avoided; keyword stuffing, purchased links, and poor user experience. When you overstuff the keyword in the content of the website the crawlers take it as junk and it actually hurts your ranking rather than boosts it. Purchased links also hurt rankings as these links are at times not relevant or used more than once. Making sure your website is easy to navigate for users, not too much content stuffing or ads would help your optimization, overdoing it on that would hurt it.

Title Tag

Other than using the keyword in the content properly, the title tag is also important for optimization. The title tag is basically the title of the website which can be seen at the top of the browser and on the search engine result page. It is important to keep the title tag precise; the title is basically a description of the contents of the page. The best format to use on the title tag would be having the primary keyword followed by the secondary keyword and then the brand name.

Meta Data

Meta data is actually hidden within the language of the website so it is not visible to the website viewers but search engine crawlers pick up on Meta tags you place in the website. Meta tag optimization is quite important when you are looking to optimize your website for search engines. Even though Google does not use Meta tags as a basis for optimization it is not the only search engine out there, Meta tags do not hurt you so it is better to incorporate them into the website. Meta tags are fairly easy to add on the website you just need to add the <head> tag right after a bit of html. Now with so many CMS based websites these systems actually do most the work for you so no reason why you would not use Meta data or tags to optimize your website.

Meta Description

It is important to add a description to everyone of your pages. If you use wordpress I recommend using the plugin Yoast SEO.( Just do a search in google) This plugin will add an area on every page of your website where you can describe the content of the page. This is the text that shows up in the search engines so be precise.

When it comes to having your website optimized for search engines, it is important to know exactly how search engines work and the best practices for optimization. Optimization is not an easy process as search engines do penalize you if you over excessively use keywords in the content and if your website is not built properly for users. So when you plan on taking your business online have a proper blueprint of what type of website you require and how you will work to optimize it. It is best to have a plan from the start which would save you time and money and also help lead your business to success online.

H1 H2  H3 tags etc

Here is how to use these!

<h1>Main Heading

<h2>Secondary Heading 1

<h3>Sub-section of the secondary heading 1

<h4>Secondary Heading 2

<h5>Sub-section of the secondary heading 2

So for example. Page is called Internet Marketing Tips. I make this <h1>!

Then my sub heading may be 5 basic tips to follow. ( Make this <h2>

Then my 5 tips are not a sub of my sub so there title will be <h3>

What is SEO & how does it work? (part one) Craig Murray Digital

Part 2 of the basics of SEO coming soon!(include offsite, link building etc )