For
most of the websites across the Internet majority of traffic is provided by
search engines ( Google , Bing ,Yahoo, etc)
regardless of website focus. Therefore, if your site cannot be properly located
and indexed by the leading search engines, you are missing out on the best
opportunity to drive targeted visitors and potential revenue. This blog will be
the first in the series of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) blogs and will
focus on what SEO is and why it is needed. Some important aspects of SEO and
how they affect the ranking of a website in search engines will also be covered
in brief.
All
leading businesses today have a focus on making a solid presence on the web and
want to stay a top on search engine result pages (SERP), SEO is the method used
to achieve this goal. Wikipedia defines SEO as the
process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search
engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or
"algorithmic") search results. For a successful Search Engine
Optimization strategy, we should remember that search engines look at content
and also at the structure of the markup. They emphasize the importance of text
content, page titles, keywords rich text, Meta descriptions and information
architecture.
But SEO
does not end here. Much like getting your body into shape through exercise
where we can’t just go to gym for a day and assume that we will be fit for
whole life, SEO is a process that requires us to continuously stick to a
disciplined routine and follow it over the period of time. We can’t just change
one or two things on our website and expect it to rocket up to the top of the
SERPS and stay there. We should focus on building rich content and links over a
long period of time.
All the
gains that we have made by working out will be gone if we start being lazy. It
is the same with SEO it is not something you can set it and then forget it. The
top positions in a SERP are not some sort of entitlement and if our website
isn’t getting better, it’s getting worse. Our competitors will always be there
struggling to catch up to us and might out rank us if we get complacent. So in
order to be successful we need to incorporate a good SEO campaign into our
normal business lifecycle. The outcome of an SEO campaign for any organization
is to create high organic rankings for the keywords/phrases for which the site
is designed. The ultimate result will be to increase the targeted traffic. A
good SEO campaign includes the following three aspects:
Keyword
analysis :
Taking into consideration the traffic, competition and relevance we should
analyze and select proper keywords for the site. If you are not selecting the
proper keywords, then the rest of the optimization will all go in vain. Site’s
appearance to both users and search engines are defined by these keywords and
so the text and theme of the site must revolve around these keywords.
Onsite
optimization: All the changes that we make in the site such text content,
architecture of the site, HTML code, and page layout falls under this aspect.
This is the most commonly understood aspect of SEO and contributes some oomph
on ranking but we should not completely depend on it only. This is where your
keywords are placed throughout the code to show the search engines what your
site is about.
Offsite
optimization: This aspect plays a vital role in determining the ranking and
quality of content. It deals with changes made outside the scope of the site
which involves increasing the quantity and quality of inbound links to the
site. The goal is to get as many sites as possible to link back to your site which
maximizes the site's exposure on the Web.
Keeping
these things in mind we will start exploring deep into SEO with focus on
keyword analysis in my next blog.
