Most websites visitors come from Search Engines searches and it is therefore important to attract some of this traffic to your website.

This article is an introduction to SEO which means Search Engine Optimization and can be defined as the set of activities which allow to optimise a website according to the rules used by the SE to return search results.

Every day people enter a very large number of searches into search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and other ones and they return the results according to relevance rules. According to some statistic most users look on average only to the first three results and rarely browse the results after the second or third page. In order to attract traffic to your site it is therefore very important to have your site selected among these first results.

Search Engines want from websites a positive experience for the visitor and assign value to good page contents and to a natural flow of backlinks in the home and in the remaining website pages.

In order to use SEO, you should start with keywords research. The term keyword refers to the words entered by search engines users to search what they are looking
for.

You should try to understand what users are searching and in which way, in order to be able to have your site among the first page results. You should try to find keywords that have a large number of searches and that are not too competitive. If you make a search with a generic keyword such as “Health Insurance”, you will find that there are many searches, but there are also millions of competitive sites which target that keyword. If you search for a specific Health Insurance company in a given area, you will get a much lower number of results and it would be easier to compete.

Once you have a list of candidate keywords to target, you can use them to optimise your website with the aim to be found by users that search those keywords.

The optimisation consists of two main parts as follows:

a) There are Onpage factors used to optimise the single website pages. Some examples are using the keywords in the title, in the headers and possibly also in the website URL, using keywords with the correct density and much more. Keywords should be used in your body text in a natural way and you should avoid using them too much because this could be considered by search engines as spamming.

b) There Offpage factors which consist mainly in getting external backlinks which will increase the popularity of your site. The search engines consider the external links as votes to your website. They count more according to the PR (Page Rank) of the external website (for instance a link from CNN counts much more than a link from Mr. Smith). Generally the SEO battle is won by the site which has the higher number of external links with a good PR (Page Rank).

It has been estimated that the Onpage factors have about a 20% influence on the Search Engines results, whereas the Offpage factors count for the remaining 80%.

You will find more information and practical sugestion on SEO at

==>  http://seo.marioebooks.com

Related Content Blogs

Enjoy this article? Bookmark it Now

Tagged with:

Filed under: Blogging • SEO • Website Traffic

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!