" If you make a product good enough, even though you live in the depths of the forest the public will make a path to your door, says the philosopher. But if you want the public in sufficient numbers, you would better construct a highway" William Randolph HearstIn my own personal attempt to understand search engine optimization, I will also incorporate here the knowledge I gathered on the same subject by the reference book, Understanding digital marketing- marketing strategies for engaging the digital generation, 2nd edition by Damian Ryan & Calvin Jones.
Most people think that SEO is rocket science and there are a whole lot of secrets that goes into it, but the truth is that the web is an open space and we just have to identify what is more important and automatically our SEO will be successful. Your site has to be crawlable, your content has to be good- and I'd include things like page titles, keyword use, etc under the umbrella of 'content' and you need quality, relevant inbound links.
One of the best places to start for tips on improving your site's ranking with the search engines is with the search engines' own guidelines, tips and resources for website owners.
Search engine Resource URL for webmasters
- Google Webmaster Central http://www.google.com/webmasters
- Bing Webmaster Tools http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/
Make your site easy to crawl
If you're looking to attract search engine traffic, the last thing you want to do is make it difficult for search engines to index your website. Make sure your site design doesn't present unnecessary obstacles to search engine spiders.
Spiders are interested in text, text and more text.They don't see the graphics, clever animations and other flashy bells and whistles that web designers routinely use to make their sites look pretty.
Choosing effective keywords
You can also use a wide range of automated keyword suggestion tools like http://bit.ly/GoogKWTool , http://bit.ly/UDMSEOBook , www.wordtracker.com , http://bit.ly/KWDiscovery. Other tools on the web can provide you with insight into how your leading competitors are doing in terms of search engine traffic for particular key words. Eg:- www.seotoolset.com , www.compete.com.
The more general a keyword is,the less likely it is that your site will contain what the searcher is trying to find. Effective SEO isn't just about generating traffic volume, it's about finding that elusive balance between keyword search volume and keyword specificity that drives the maximum volume of targeted traffic to your site.
Focus on one page at a time
One of the key things to remember when you're approaching SEO is that you'll be optimizing your site one page at a time. While you'll look at some site-wide factors as part of your SEO effort, SEO isn't a straightforward 'one-size-fits-all' operation, and each of the existing pages on your site will need to be optimized independently.
Each page in your website will have different target keywords that reflect the page's content. For example,say you have a page about history of stamps. Then 'stamp history' might be your keywords for that page.
Content- the most important thing on your site
Unique,relevant, informative content is what sets your site apart from the competition. It's the reason users want to visit you, why other sites will want to link to you and of course, why search engines will want to suggest your site to their users in search results.
When writing content for your site the key thing to remember is that you're writing it first and foremost, for a human audience, not for search engine spiders. Yes, your page need to be search engine friendly, but the spiders should always be a secondary consideration: put your human audience first.
Links- second only to content
Search engine algorithm can't read the content and assess its quality the way humans can-at least, not yet. Instead the engines have to rely on other criteria, and one of the main things that indicates a page's perceived importance to a search engine's ranking algorithm is the quantity and quality of references- or links- to that page from other web pages.
Each link to a page is, if you like, a vote of confidence for that page. The more links that point to an individual page(and globally to the site as a whole), the higher the collective vote of confidence for that page(and/or site) becomes, and the more important the page is deemed to be by the search engines.
Link building tips:
- Generate truly valuable content that other sites will want to link to
- Let people know your site is out there
- Create your own blog
- Network. network, network
- Ask the people who link to your competitors to link to you
- Encourage links within content and with descriptive anchor text
- Submit your site to high quality directories
- Use link bait
- Offer to swap links with a selected few relevant, high-quality sites
Submitting your site URL and sitemap
Submitting your URL, strictly speaking, isn't necessary any more. If you've followed the advice above,and have managed to secure some inbound links, it won't be long before the spiders find you. That said, all of the major search engines offer a free submission process, and submitting your site won't hurt.
The other thing you can do that will help search engines to crawl all relevant pages on your website is to submit an XML sitemap that adheres to the sitemap protocol outlined on www.sitemaps.org .
The ever changing nature of the search environment means that there's no magic bullet in SEO and it never ends. You have to work hard to find the right blend of target keywords for your particular business, operating within your particular market at the current point in time. You have to optimize your pages based on those keywords, and deliver compelling, high-impact content. You have to attract incoming links.
Then you have to measure, monitor and refine continuously tweaking and turning your optimization efforts based in changing conditions in the marketplace, the search engines and your customers. Take your foot off the gas, and that high ranking you've worked so hard to achieve will gradually (and sometimes not so gradually) start to slip away.
Optimization is a dynamic and iterative process- and if you want sustained results it needs to be ongoing. To learn more, check out some of the free and subscription based SEO resources online like http://bit.ly/UDMSEOMoz , http://bit.ly/UDMSEOBook .
Hope you will get some understanding on SEO by refering to the above resources and I will conclude my write-up by pointing out 10 organic SEO myths.
- You should submit your URLs to search engines
- You need a Google sitemap
- You need to update your site frequently
- PPC ads will help/hurt ranking
- Your site will be banned if you ignore Google's guidelines
- Your site will be banned if you buy links
- Header tags must be used for high rankings
- Words in your meta keyword tag have to be used on the page
- SEO copy must be 250 words in length
- You need to optimize for the long tail
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