SEO Article - The Basics of SEO

The Basics of Search Engine Optimization

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SEO short for Search Engine Optimization is the act of optimizing a website and its web pages in the hope of getting higher rankings with the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, among others. These are the leading search engines today and while there are so many others out there, it is always important to ensure you optimize your site for these three as many web surfers today will use one of these when looking for something online.

Generally, the search engines will take a lot into consideration before ranking your site. Optimizing things in your site is known as On-page optimization while all else that isn’t directly related to your site is known as off-page optimization. Even though the main ranking formula that the search engines use is a top kept secret, here is what many agree is ‘simple SEO’.

First is to enhance your On-page optimization which should start with the right selection of keywords. Luckily, technology has made it very easy as there are many tools available online that can help you search for keywords to use in relation to your site’s niche. This is the basic on-site Search Engine Optimization – matching the keyword density on your website.

On the other hand, off-site SEO is everything that isn’t on site, which for starters, it is simply link building. You would want to link and get links from relevant websites but which have few other links to other websites to reduce competition. To get links from other websites, you can submit your website to directories because many online directories are listed on the search engines. The other way you can obtain links is through reciprocal linking, otherwise known as trading links.

This simply means that you request a site to link to yours and in return link back. Reciprocal linking is best done when you are linking to a site that is on the same niche or market as yours. Simply do this for all the leading websites that have the same keywords as yours and link back. The more links you have translate to higher rankings in the search engines, more specifically if you get links from well reputed and long-standing websites. This is because search engines gauge the relevance of a site by the number and quality of links from other websites. The search engines assume that if such reputed websites think your site is relevant enough to link to, then it should be, and viola, you get your high rankings on the search engines.