Understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

a professional SEO expert pointing at different ways of search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making your website more accessible to search engines. The goal of optimization is to have search engine spiders to easily find your site and rank the page relevance so that it appears at the top of search engine results.

The process of optimization requires adequate site architecture, content with proper keywords, and link development. The process requires continuous testing, monitoring, tuning, and maintenance.

If you want to rank high, you have to play within the rules. That means no deception. All your keywords should be relevant to the content of each page, and it should be natural for each subject. Redirection technology should always contain the appropriate keywords and display page the user expects to visit.

I recommend sticking to white-hat SEO and making sure to never use any unaccepted practice. White-hat SEO techniques work and reliable for your long-term business practice.

Studies indicate the listing in Google’s organic search results receive about 35 percent of the traffic, compared to 20 percent for the second position. The farther down in the search results you appear, the less likely it is for someone to click the link to your site.

In order to appear on the first page of Google, your website needs strong search engine optimization.

All search engines try to keep their customers happy by providing the most relevant results to search queries. In order to keep the search results relevant, search engines need to understand the main subject of a website.

You can help the search engines to find your site by understanding the major factors they look for to qualify yours over others:

Content: content is the information your website contains, such as articles, videos, images, etc. In order for your content to qualify, it must be unique and valuable, among many other details. It also contains the search terms relevant to its main content. The search terms are the keywords or phrases that searchers enter into search box looking for specific information.
Thin content, duplicate content, irrelevant keywords to the content of a page and use of excessive keywords such as repeating the same keywords, using the same color of font as the background are among the many factors that could adversely affect your website.
Popularity: Search engine spiders look for number and quality of links pointing to your website. Links to your site is like a vote. The more quality and relevant links to your site, the higher your site will rank.
Architecture: Your website must be well organized and easy to navigate. Another factor is the site’s response time which is how long it takes to load a page.

Other factors affecting your SEO efforts are choosing proper Meta tags and whether your site is mobile-friendly, and also bounce rate. The bounce rate measures how often someone clicks on a page and immediately hits the back button.

Spiders also referred to as crawlers is the software search engines use to read your website, measure whether you have enough content, adequate links, and many other factor, including whether your website complies with all the rules set by search engines.

For additional articles written by John Stanford, see alliedpublishing.com/seo. John Stanford is the author of Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization.

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