Basics Of SEO
A Strong Foundation For Your Online Business
The ultimate goal of any business online or offline is to turn its prospects into buyers and make money in the process. An online business is built with the aim of increasing the site visibility so as to attract more visitors who will likely buy its products/services. When people search for a particular term or phrase, they should be able to find your website. With this in mind, the following article aims to touch introduce the basics of SEO a strong foundation for your online business.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process that helps your website rank higher up in the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing and many others. Any successful website needs to have great content and a usable, well laid-out design. These major components aside, your website should be well-optimized in order to reach the top positions on the first page of search engines.
Basic Rules
There are a few basic rules that govern SEO. Once you follow these simple and easy-to-understand rules, you will be able to increase your business manifold.
Internet
Who searches the Internet for information? People who want to shop online look for the best products available. People who have health problems search for information regarding their condition. There are others who look out for entertainment news and want to purchase tickets to events.
Main Keywords
Depending on these categories, you are likely to own a website to cater to the needs of your prospective customers. The keywords chosen for your specific niche should be those that these people search for. So keyword research is the first and foremost thing that you should focus on. Once you have decided on the keywords you need to buy an exact match domain that includes your main keyword.
Content
Putting up great content on the site is the next step. Take care to deliver content that keeps your visitors’ attention for a considerable amount of time. Take care to see that the H1, H2 and H3 tags contain the title. Make sure that your content is related to the chosen keywords because relevancy is what the search engine bots or spiders look for.
“Alt” tags
The images on your site should contain “Alt” tags that are visible when visitors hover the mouse over the image. Make the site navigation simple so that your prospects are able to follow the links and get the information they need. Relevancy is another important aspect looked for by the spiders when they crawl your website.
Search Engine
Search engine bots love fresh content, so it is important to keep updating the content on your website.It may be worthwhile having a blog and keeping it up-to-date with new content that attracts the spiders and increase your online visibility.
On and Off-page SEO
Having taken care of the niche, keywords, domain and the site content that are grouped under on-page SEO, it is now important to do some off-page SEO. Your site may appear beautiful and may have excellent content to keep your visitors engaged, but without quality backlinks, it will not attract traffic.
This means that your primary objective of making money through sales of your products/services will not be met. Link building is one of the most important aspects of off-page SEO. There are many ways to build links to your website.
Backlinks
Article marketing, profile creation, blog commenting, forum posting, linking to .edu and .gov websites and social bookmarking are some of the great techniques used to build quality backlinks to your site. Remember that quality always prevails over quantity and a fewer number of high quality backlinks help increase your SERP than thousands of low quality backlinks. You should also take care to build links naturally in order to avoid being labelled a spammer by the search engines.
Once you know the knack of optimizing your website, it would become very easy for you to make tons of money online because a well-optimized site always attracts not only visitors to help increase sales, but also the electronic search engine spiders that keep your website on page one.
Author Bio: James is an SEO expert who writes for www.make-a-web-site.com. He writes on several different topics in various niches.
If all those jobs are done manually, the process is very time-consuming and also no once can say which seo practice is effective.
@NseIndia Yes and no… a lot of the on-site SEO can be accomplished quite simply with a flex SEO plugin which literally tells you which fields you need to fix or address and each one turns from red to green once you’ve done each job properly… If it takes an hour to write an article, it’ll take 2 minutes max to do optimize the on-site SEO… so its not THAT time consuming.
Backlinks are another story.
If you want to test what’s effective, use the process of elimination and try posts with all some of the SEO techniques but not others. If certain techniques result in better pagerank / traffic, then obviously those are more important areas to concentrate.
All of this is relative. If you’re an occasional solo blogger than you’ll be doing this yourself – but the amount of work is relative to the amount of content you create. If you’re a major content publisher you probably have a team of people working on different area of SEO….
In the end you’re writing for human readers and google bots. (in that order). Some major publications rank very successfully without emphasizing SEO while other major publications focus entirely on SEO to their detriment. A site written entirely for google bots is almost inevitably less engaging to human audiences.