SEO or search engine optimization is something that every web owner and creator should be aware of. Even if a website owner hires an expert to carry out the online marketing, understanding the very basics and how it really can improve a websites performance and popularity is important.
Simply put, optimizing a website is important and is built around keywords that are valuable to a website and to the products or services it is trying to provide. By focusing on main keywords or key phrases for a business, and expanding on them over time, can improve the amount of visitors a website receives, in turn increasing profits or simply improving its popularity if it is an information website.
Focusing on main keywords and phrases, then expanding them by looking at reports easily available on the net, or by looking at competitors and words they are using, is imperative to setting up and preparing a site so that search engines are easily able to crawl the site without encountering problems. Confusion can be created with a site that has every page aimed at a different target audience. The density, or how many times a key word or phrase appears is hugely important, to avoid being banned by a search engine for ‘spamming’.
The major engines, such as Yahoo, Google and AOL, need to be able to visit a website and make evaluations in order for a person to find that site under a relevant search. Therefore, helping a site improve the way it ranks (and in a perfect world at least on page one of certain searches), SEO is a means of making a site more valuable and can reap good benefits for any business.
Basic optimization currently states that key-words or key-phrases should appear in the last sentence and the first sentence of the text on a page. In and ideal world, it needs to appear in titles, headings, the domain name or URL, meta tags and in links to other pages. But there should be careful consideration to ensure that they do not appear too much (keyword density is vital and different experts will advise on the percentage to aim at.
Alternative things that are also very important is that pages containing lots of text or very little, will mean a search engine will struggle to crawl that page. In addition to this, web pages built using or containing flash, java-script or frames will make it hard for a search engine too.
Part of the search engine optimization process has to occur away from the website, once it has been prepared properly. This includes longer term work such as submitting the website domain name to relevant smaller search engines and directories (for example a local store may register with a regionally based directory), writing articles and in very basic terms getting links back to the website from other relevant and well ranking sites.
Of course human visitors are important. A site needs to be useful to a visitor, and part of SEO is to manage the content, ensure links are fully working and that errors are not apparent. Keeping a site up to date and relevant is not only vital to search engines, but to the actual visitors looking around a site.
Mike Gates is an online marketer and recommends HostGator for hosting. HostGator is the cheapest web host. HostGator coupons available at http://hostgatorcouponandreview.com/hostgator-coupon.html.