What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is a part of SEM(Search Engine Marketing). Whenever you enter a search term in a search engine the relevant results are displayed in a specific order. The content that search engine "thinks" to be more relevant is shown higher than the other content. For making the search engine believe that the content of our website is relevant we need to do some changes to our website to make it search engine friendly. This is the central idea of SEO(Search Engine Optimisation). In this article we will be discussing:
What are search engines and How Search Engines Work?
How to SEO
What are keywords
What are backlinks and how to use backlinks
What are meta tags and how to use meta tags

Definition of SEO: Search Engine Optimisation refers to techniques and methods to index our web content higher on the search engines' unpaid, organic results. Organic/unpaid means that the web sites are not paying the search engines to show their website higher in search results.
Before going further we must understand how a search engine works so that we may make our optimization more efficient.

What are search engines and How Search Engines Work?

Search engines are programs that search for a specified keyword in all of its database of documents. Web search engines (or simply called as search engines) are search engines for the web(i.e. all the websites published on web).
Every search engine has different algorithm to search the web and create its list of relevant results.
It must be kept in mind that optimizing a web site for one engine may not result in auto optimization for the other one. However the algorithms are more or less the same, so some general notions can be used to optimize the website.
Usually search engines deploy "spiders" to "crawl" the web. The next question is- What are spiders or crawlers?. Spiders/crawlers are programs that crawl (i.e. visit) the websites in a particular fashion. Spiders start with a particular URL and stores all the links on that URl. After that it visits the stored list of URls one by one and repeats the same process.
Example: Suppose the crawler starts from the URL of this page. It then scans this web page for links. Suppose it finds 100 links on this page. It then goes to all the 100 URLs one by one and scans those pages for links. It then repeats the process of visiting/crawling those pages and storing the links found on them. This process of crawling goes on until it has visited all the pages of web. Obviously this process takes time and its very much possible that after its first visit to your site it visits you after several weeks.
Now once the web pages have been crawled the next step is to index them in an order for a particular keyword (we will discuss later in detail what are keywords). This again involves some algorithm which we do not need to know for our further excursion to SEO. After a search string is received the search engine then compares it with the indexed pages and shows the relevant results.

How to SEO?

The next question is how to optimize the web pages for search engines. It involves some very easy tasks which can be understood as we know how search engines work.
We are going to discuss the factors affecting page rank in search results one by one in detail:

1. Keywords

What are keywords and how to use keywords

Keyword refers to those words /phrases that are entered (i.e. searched) in a search engine. When you enter a search term/keyword in a search engine it looks it up in its database and shows results. If your website has optimum number of keywords in your web content, at right places than your website will be ranked higher. Therefore keywords play an important role in defining the traffic to your site. Keywords can be used to attract specific targeted customers to your website.

How to choose keywords: Those times are gone when including a single well searched keyword in your web content will rank you on top of web results. Today when there are billions of web pages its is more realistic and practical to optimize web content for phrases of keywords rather than a single keyword. You have to find the keywords specific to your content and then optimize your website.
For example if your website is about books it is useless to concentrate on books as keyword. No matter how much optimization you do you will never make it to the top results. But instead if you narrow your optimization to, say, "books for kindergarten children", you can rank considerably high after seo of your website.
Google ad words keyword tool:
You can take the help of keyword tools like Google keyword tool to find the relevant keywords specific to your content. Below I have shown you how to use google keyword tool:
First go to google keyword tool site. In the field provided enter a keyword. For example I have entered SEO in the screenshot shown below:
Example of ad words keyword tool

As you can see it shows you the monthly searches for different phrases with "seo" in it. From here you can get an idea what people are searching for. Also you can search each of these terms in google to find out the number of search results. A less number of search results means that it will be easier for you to compete among them. So take those keywords that have less search results but are highly searched for.

Where to place keywords?
The next question is where to place the keywords in the web content. Below are the places in decreasing order of importance that you should be working upon:

URL: Here you have to strike a balance between length of url and relevance of url. For example as I said be specific in choosing keywords, so it won't be a good idea to create a url like "books.com". If you make the name to be "books-for-kinder-garten-children.com" than obviously its too long and people will forget it soon. So you have to choose carefully here.

Title tag: You must include the keywords in title tag of your html document since title tag has great importance to the search engines.

Headings: You can include keywords in the headings also. Just follow the general principle that the heading should be readable.

Content: at last you should include keywords in the content.

Backlinks

What are backlinks and how to use backlinks

There are two types of links:

1. That lead away from your website, i.e. links to some other websites from your website-outboud links

2. That lead to your website from some other website-inbound links

The second type of links is called as backlinks. You should avoid outbound links and create as many backlinks as possible. This is because more backlinks means that the crawler will visit you website again and again which is very very important. Remember its not just the quantity but also quality that matters for backlinks. Backlinks from well reputed sites have more weightage than from normal sites.
When you create a link to some other site remember to put some keywords in the link text. Instead of writing "click here" you should write keywords specific to the content of the web page to which you are linking.

Meta tags:

What are meta tags and how to use meta tags

Meta tags contain information that is invisible to the reader but search engines do scan them and use them in their indexing algorithm. Meta tags, in short summarize the contents of a web page for the web crawlers. Meta tags are used

1. to write a small description of your website

2. to write keywords

General tips:

1. More important than anything else is the content of your website. There are many unfair methods(known as black hat SEO) to rank your pages high but they don't last long. A good content makes ever increasing readership. Avoid spamming and write original content. Copied content does pays price.

2. Crawlers can't crawl through password protected content, javascript content, flash content,etc. , so use them judiciously.

3. You can always pay firms to increase traffic to your site. You can opt for advertising your website. But for a normal user this isn't a viable option, so he has to rely on his own SEO skills.
4. You can check the page rank of your web page by using the Google Page Rank Checker

Search Engine Optimization

What is SEO?

What are search engines and How Search Engines Work?

How to SEO?

1. Keywords

What are keywords and how to use keywords

Backlinks

What are backlinks and how to use backlinks

Meta tags:

What are meta tags and how to use meta tags

General tips:

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