Imagine how wonderful your life would be if you could earn free traffic that converted to returning visitors. While it may seem like a fairy tale, it’s actually pretty practical.
Search engines provide an amazing source of traffic just waiting to be tapped in to. The majority of visits from search engines are targeted and will, in the end, help you go far.
Many websites receive thousands of websites a month, yet many more seem to fall short of the golden ticket. What makes those websites better than you? They utilize SEO.
What is SEO
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is the rewarding process of improving your rankings inside of search engines. It’s not new, but it’s still very unknown.
Search engines use “spiders” to “crawl” your website
I don’t mean unknown in an undiscovered sense, but rather that it still isn’t fully understood. In the early days of SEO, it was far easier to amount to a large scale of success.
Search engines “crawl” websites with their “spiders”, sifting through hundreds of important factors, then deciding the relevance of the website.
The algorithms that they use are still unknown for sure, but we know that there are several aspects that influence the rankings, such as keywords and backlinks.
In the early 1990′s, it was far easier to rank – just adding keywords to your website would get you to the top. In today’s world, however, it is much more difficult, and search engines are pretty good at finding fraudulent websites.
Factors That Go Into Indexing
Keywords
If you want to get anywhere with search engines, keywords are one of the most important factors – without them, the robots will have, in reality, almost no clue what to rank your website for.
The keywords you use are what your website will appear for when searched. For example, if you optimize your website around the keyword “websites”, it will appear when users search for “websites”.
You should invest a significant amount of time in researching keywords. You want low competition, highly searched, relevant keywords. Some tools to help you find such keywords are:
Backlinks
While utilizing just keywords was massively successful in the 90′s, you now need to back it up with some reassurance. Backlinks are a great method.
Backlinks create an SEO-juice chain.
Backlinks are just as they sound – links back to your website. Whenever a website links to your website, they share a little bit of their “link juice” with your website – they pass their credibility on to you.
If you were to look at any website that attracts massive search engine traffic, you’d realize that they receive a large number of backlinks. That is no coincidence.
A practice has emerged in the SEO game to improve your rankings through backlinks – purchasing a large number of them.
Search engines have learned, however, the deceiving practices of some search-engine-spammers that abuse backlinks by purchasing them in bulk, and contoured their algorithms to halt the spammers.
In reality, it’s only going to hurt you – so work on gaining backlinks from quality sources and it will pay off largely. Great methods to build backlinks include:
- Blog commenting
- Guest posting
- Adding your link to forum signatures (while posting value)
- Social Networks
Content & General Relevance
As time has set, search engines have learned a great deal about determining the general relevance of a website. That relevance pays a major role in the website’s ranking.
Using factors like speed, backlinks, and content, search engines can easily determine if your website is spam or not.
You read it right – your content plays a role in whether or not you’re deemed relevant. You may be wondering how, though.
It’s quiet simple, actually – it boils down to three (of many) points:
- Relevance of Content
- Duplicate Content
- Keywords in Content
We can, for the means of explanation, link point one (the relevance) and three (the keywords) together.
Your content should incorporate keywords naturally, yet still be quality and on-subject with the rest of the keywords. It really comes down to quality. You really want quality content – it will attract more users, backlinks, and search engine love.
Search engines are also really good at detecting duplicate content. It’s not hard to find out if content has been literally ripped from another website.
Should search engines find you to be publishing duplicate content often, your website will be penalized – you’ll quickly lose out on SEO.
Do You Utilize SEO?
Photo Credit: Thumbnail | Spider | Chains
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for sharing. I’m in the business of search engine optimization, so I’m already aware of just about everything you discussed in your article, but it always helps to get a refresher here and there, as well as a new perspective from someone else.
As far as backlinks go, I agree that one should avoid the purchasing of links in bulk. I’ve utilized this tactic for my blog a few times over the years (admittedly, mostly out of sheer laziness), and I wouldn’t doubt it one bit if it set the progress in my search engine results back a while. While I do get traffic from these links, the quality of the vast majority of these sites is horrendous! I even ended up getting backlinks from porn sites, which I had no idea I was going to receive when I made these purchases.
I agree – tactics are always changing and, therefore, it is best not to stick to just one forever.
I’ve never personally purchased links, but I’ve talked to those who have – and they generally have nothing good to say. On the not of the bad links, I believe Google will now penalize you if a lot of banned websites link to you, simply because you are most likely buying links. It’s pretty scary.
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