Search Engine Optimization Facts & Basics - A Small Leap But A Giant Step Towards Online Marketing Success
Hearing the acronym SEO is not new to most online marketers. In fact, it is one of the unwritten protocols that every aspiring internet marketer should learn and keep in mind. Thus, if you are not familiar with SEO, you will have a hard time achieving your online marketing business goals.
Before discussing SEO for online marketing beginners, let's first deal with search engines. If you are familiar with Yahoo, Google or MSN, these are some of the most widely used search engines on the Internet. If you are looking for any information on the Internet, search engines will always be your first and perhaps only choice. You will only type several words related to the information you are looking for in the search box, and when you click the "search button" you will be redirected to a page with lists of sites containing the words you type in the search box.
Due to the popularity of search engines for internet users, internet marketers consider it as one of the essential tools in getting buyers online. Thus, it has paved the way for the birth of search engine optimization as an essential feature in online marketing. The acronym stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the art of producing web pages that will have high rankings in relevant search engine results. This is achieved by optimizing several sections or elements in the HTML markup of each web page. Search engines specifically interpret such sections, and the latter will rank the first according to the level of improvement.
There are different approaches and opinions on how to optimize a particular web page. These methods and opinions will depend greatly on the type of website you have, its contents, purpose of existence, and current competition. However, when talking about general SEO, it largely depends on the correct use of certain keywords and/or key phrases used to describe your website content.
You will probably be wondering how these keywords affect the SEO performance of your online marketing website. When you search for the required information using several words, you will notice that these words are "highlighted" when viewing the search results. The words you type into the search box serve as "keywords" that webmasters use to improve their websites. Although they may not be of interest to an Internet user, they are as good as "gold" for online marketers who want their site to appear on the first pages of every relevant search engine result.
The keywords used in SEO have standard positions on the website. For example, these keywords should appear in the title section of your web page's source code. Moreover, it should appear in the META description section where the page is described in an accurate manner by repeating the specified keywords. The META section often contains the keywords used to describe your site's content, products, or service.
If you were to analyze the previous discussion carefully, you would notice that the SEO performance of a site is highly dependent on the keywords you use. Thus, keywords or key phrases should appear in the first two paragraphs of each page's content, then scattered throughout the rest of the page. When distracting your keywords, make sure that they will be an integral part of the content itself. It should appear as if it were among the original content of the page.
In addition, the last paragraph of each page should be rich in keywords. One of the unwritten rules of keyword placement is that the keyword density on your page should be between 5 to 15 percent. Although it is advisable to maximize the use of your keywords, avoid using them excessively. Content with a keyword density above the standard will not help improve your website.
Another consideration in SEO performance for your site is the placement of relative backlinks or hyperlinks that point to external sites. It is relatively important because search engine spiders navigate through links. In addition, your page text related to external links may contain keywords as well.
If you are an aspiring internet marketer who wants to take on the challenge of earning on the internet, never forget the shortcut that will lead you to the success of your online marketing career – SEO.