Understand Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO - thoughtful and well-designed accessibility

While quality content is important for retaining visitors, Search Engine Optimization is essential to drive traffic to your website in the first place. Since the majority of all web traffic comes from search engines, it is important to optimize your website so that it appears among the top results for searches on keywords related to your site. Various factors, such as page content and link popularity, are weighed by the search engine's algorithm to arrive at the order in which it lists sites on the search result pages.

Ideally, you want your web site to rank among the top ten results for keywords that you are targeting (keyword in this article refers to both keywords and key phrases).  To improve your search placement, you may have to sacrifice some images and videos to ensure that your HTML code is search engine friendly.

Research shows that 500 to 800 words of content on your Web site will help you get found by search engine spiders. As more websites compete, search engines are looking for more and more content on your website.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of naturally driving traffic to your site.  By making a website more search engine friendly, a site will rank higher on the search engine result page.

Site improvements include changing or adding content, improving internal and external links, and formatting meta tags. Content is the most important part of Search Engine Optimization. Without enough content containing the right keywords, you have very little chance of securing a high ranking in any major search engine. Used correctly, SEO can lead to a very profitable search marketing campaign.

Well known search engines such as Google rank websites according to complex algorithms which are designed to determine which websites are most relevant for particular search terms. Therefore taking the time and effort to optimize your website for relevant search terms may result in you being rewarded with high search engine rankings for these terms.

This is important because most Internet users rely heavily on these rankings. It is not uncommon for Internet users to only review the first few results when they search for a particular term. This means if your website ranks high enough to appear on the first page of the search results you will likely enjoy increased website traffic.

However, if your website does not make it to the first page or even the second page, it is unlikely you will receive a great deal of website traffic from visitors who use search engines.

The algorithms used by search engines include a number of different factors. Some of the common factors in the equation include keyword density, META tags, titles, inbound links, website traffic and content.

There are multiple ways to do Search Engine Optimization, most of which are menu items on the left.

Keyword density refers to the number of times a particular keyword is used in the content of your website. The theory behind this concept is that websites which use a keyword often are likely and extremely relevant to that keyword. However, over using same keywords would get you penalized by search engines.

META tags are pieces of HTML code which some search engines use in evaluating the content of a website. Placing keywords in these tags can be beneficial in some search engines. However, care should be taken to avoid placing irrelevant keywords in these tags as this may result in your website being penalized.

There is a nice, informative and needed article on how BlueVoda attempts to solve the SEO problem that most of us face.