Tavis Understands SEO, Does That Make Him The Smartest Person On The Internet?
So what exactly is SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) and why is it so vitally important to have a basic understanding of it as a website owner?. Even if you’re not the Smartest Person On The Internet, it’s very easy to understand. SEO is basically the process of choosing the most appropriate targeted keyword(s) and keyword phrases related to your product, service, article, promotional offer, etc etc and ensuring that this particular keyword will actually appear in the search results when someone searches for your product. It’s completely useless to have the most technically advanced website on the web if nobody can find your site in the search results and this is the essence of SEO.
Search Engine Optimization basically involves optimizing or fine-tuning the content of your website along with the HTML and “Meta Tags” and also involves building an optimized internal and external link structure. The greather the number of links to your website from other external sources, the higher the probability your site is deemed relevant or these other outside sources wouldn’t be linking to you (common sense isn’t it?) Search Engines which comprise the most web-visitor queries are obviously Google, Yahoo, MSN but there are also many other 2nd tier search engines as well (kanoodle, pageseeker, search123, 7search, searchfeed to name a few). Each and every guards their ranking algorithm and secret methods very closely in an attempt to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to prevent spam pages or automatically generated sites or programs from clogging those results. A search engine may use hundreds of different factors when ranking their listings where the factors themselves and the strength each carries are constantly being modified. These algorithms can differ so widely between search engines that a site that appears #1 in a particular search engine may rank #200 in another search engine. I have no idea where my smartest guy on the web post ranks on some of the other search engines, but since you likely have never heard those 2nd tier search engines I listed earlier, I’m not terribly concerned about ranking in their results – Google is the mother of all search engines anyway so that’s what I focus on. New webpages don’t need to be “submitted” to search engines in order to be listed. A simple backlink from a well established site will cause the search engines to visit the new site and begin to index or spider its information. It could take a few days to even weeks from the referring of a link from an established web for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site.
- When selling products online, use simple payment and shipment methods to make your customer’s experience fast and easy.
- Place primary and secondary keywords within the first 25 words in your page content and spread them evenly throughout the document.
- Make your customer visit easy and give them plenty of ways to remember you in the form of newsletters, free reports, reduction coupons etc.
- Don’t look at your website as a static brochure. Treat it as a dynamic, ever-changing sales tool and location, just like your real store to which your customers with the same seriousness.
- Use reports and logs from your web hosting company to see where your traffic is coming from. Analyze your visitor location and their incoming sources whether search engines or links from other sites and the keywords they used to find you.
If none of this makes any sense at all and you have no idea what the best keywords are to target for your specific website or market, there are MANY 3rd party companies out there who can help you out. Reputable search engine promotion and optimization companies will look at the plan for your site and make recommendations to improve your search engine rankings which ultimately means increased website traffic. If you wish, many can also provide ongoing consultation and reporting to monitor your website and make further recommendations for editing and other improvements to sustain your site traffic flowing and your search engine ranking high. Normally your search engine optimization expert works as a team with your web designer to establish an integrated plan right away so that all aspects of design are taken into consideration at the same time.
So at the end of the day, this article should shed some light on what SEO is all about and how it can help the average hobby webmaster who isn’t the Smartest Person On The Internet.