Search Engine Optimization: What is it?
Search engine optimization, often referred to as SEO, is the process of improving a website’s ranking in search engines for particular keywords. For example, a barber shop in Springfield, Missouri might want to rank high for the keywords “barbers springfield mo,” and the SEO professional that they hire would conduct an SEO campaign with the hopes of accomplishing this goal.
There are two major components of SEO: onsite SEO and offsite SEO.
Onsite SEO involves optimizing the content, coding, and other aspects of your website to make it search engine friendly. Some activities in this category might include adding keywords to the text of your website, reorganizing the content of your website, and optimizing your HTML code. All of these activities allow your website to better “communicate” to search engines what your site is about and the quality of your content. This is sometimes an overlooked aspect of SEO, but is a critical step when conducting your campaign.
Offsite SEO is the part of search engine optimization that most people are referring to when they use the term. There is a lot of controversy and differing opinions and ideas about Offsite SEO, but everyone can agree on one thing: Links are important. Very important. More specifically, when conducting an SEO campaign you want to acquire links on quality websites and ideally on websites with content similar to your own.
The keywords used when creating these links are especially important. To demonstrate this, go over to Google and type “click here” and then look at the first result.
Are you surprised by the result? The website isn’t clickhere.com, there’s no mention of “click here” in the title, description, or anywhere on the web page. So, why is this?
There are links all over the web that look just like this: click here to download Adobe Reader. There are likely millions of these links that have the words “click here” and are pointing to Adobe’s website. Of course, there’s little value in ranking high for those keywords, but it definitely demonstrates the importance of keywords in your links.
So back to our example of a barber in Springfield, Missouri, he would probably want to create links that look like this: barber springfield, mo or something similar. And he would want to choose wisely where these links should be placed and how many.
There’s much more to SEO than what I’ve covered in this post. And regardless of the activities undertaken, it’s important to remember that all of this takes time. In fact, somtimes it takes a great deal of time and effort before you will rank well in search engines such as Google. But, in the end, your persistance will pay off.
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