Introduction to SEO
Search Engine Optimization, more commonly referred to as SEO, is one of the most crucial aspects of marketing. As such, if you’re working to market your blog or your business, you need to know what SEO means and what the rules and ways of SEO success are. While a successful SEO strategy isn’t an exact science, and its practice has been challenged on many fronts throughout the years, knowing the basics is still important to an effective marketing campaign.
What is SEO?
SEO refers to the process of making a website more visible on a search engine’s results page. To clarify, a great SEO strategy will put a company’s website at the top of the list on a Google search page, therefore increasing the likelihood that people will visit the site. Search engines strive to provide the most relevant results for a person conducting a search, so that when a person runs an internet search for “cupcakes,” the first thing to appear isn’t a cookie shop, but a bakery that specializes in cupcakes as well as a definition of the dessert. In other words, SEO helps to make a search relevant to the user and can be critical in driving traffic to your site.
Search engines work by searching the Internet to find text that meets certain criteria. This text is known as keywords and refers to the most important theme(s) of the website, company, or product. Scouring the online world to find keywords are why, as in the example above, a search for “cupcakes” yields a result of multiple pages about cupcakes, not cookies. Other important things that a search engine uses to rank a website include titles, headings, and links that make up the content of a website’s pages. Search engines also employ search engine indexing to find, digest, and store the content of a website. A search engine index refers to the set of data that’s used to base a final search result on.
The Importance of Keyword Research
Another important part of an SEO introduction is understanding the significance of keywords. We explained above that keywords are the specific words or set of words that best describe the theme or overall concept of an idea, website, business, or product. Keywords are the words that people use when conducting a search, and should be words that are included in the content of your webpage. Choosing the right keywords can help to drive traffic to your site, attract potential customers, and greatly improve your SEO ranking.
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When deciding what keywords you should include in your text, you should consider things such as the relevancy of the keyword(s) to your website and company, as well as the competitors that are using the same keyword(s) (you can check this by running a quick Google search of chosen keywords yourself, and seeing what sites appear at the top of the list). To discover the value of your keywords, you can buy a sample campaign from Google AdWords, which will allow you to test the traffic generated by your chosen keywords. If all three things are in check—the keywords are relevant to your website, competitors are experiencing success with similar keywords, and a sample campaign yields high traffic—you should feel confident in moving forward with the keywords.
SEO Tools and Services
Although an SEO introduction is a fantastic place to start, as your marketing initiatives develop, you might want to think about acquiring additional SEO products and services. These resources are frequently made available by the search engines themselves, including Google's Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Google AdWords Keywords Tool, Google Alerts, Google Trends, DoubleClick Ad Planner, Google Page Speed, Google Site Map, and others.
In addition to the tools offered by Google, you may also investigate additional internet tools or even employ a business that specializes in SEO marketing to build and optimize your website.
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