Search Engine Optimization Basics
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Those words alone sound intimidating. I was listening to training today and something about search engine optimization or SEO, jumped out at me. You see, I have been a student of SEO for about 2 years. My focus has been on and off, well, mostly off, but my interest in the topic is still there.
Here’s the bottom line; if you have a website or are online, regardless of your business, either offline or online, you need to have some basic SEO concepts and you need to have your site optimized for SEO.
Let’s start with what is SEO.
SEO is a method of creating your web pages with elements of specific characteristics. When Google, Yahoo or Bing or one of the many other search engines are looking for content on the web, there has to be a way to find the right topic for the person doing the search. So, the search engines go out hunting for content. Content is anything that is on the web. These search engines have one goal in mind and that is to provide the searcher with results that are meaningful and relevant to their search. You’ve seen the Bing commercials where you type in glass and you get anything from the glasses on your face to the glass that’s used on the space shuttle. Google, Yahoo and Bing want to to be happy with what results you get, so they index content that is on the web.
How do they index all this stuff, well, they use crawlers that search the web for keywords and content that will match what you type in the search bar. This content is indexed based on elements that are found on the pages. So if you have an article on online marketing, and the topic is relevant and the page has these elements successfully placed, then the page will show up in search results. The more relevant and the more accurate keywords are to the search, the higher it shows up on the search results.
Let’s face it, if you are selling cow chips and someone searches for manure, you want to optimize your page for manure. You can optimize it for cow chips too. Now if you’re selling chocolate chips, you don’t really provide any value showing up in the search results for cow chips.
What’s my point. I am learning how to take content that I write, put some key words in the right places and not overcomplicate it, and get the search engine crawlers to find my blog post or article. Doing this is not necessarily a science, but it is somewhat of a puzzle that if done right will produce good results, and if done wrong, could get an article or blog post pushed all the way to the bottom of the search results.
Let me ask you this, if you’re cow chip page shows up on the 95th page of Google search results will you sell many cow chips? How about if you’re cow chip page shows up on the first page? You’re right. Showing up on the first page will get you more sales, providing your searching audience is looking for cow chips to buy!
If you want to learn more about SEO…
and how to add small things to your article or blog to increase ranking, join me inside Empower Network. You’ll learn a skill that can make a nice living and you can just enjoy learning the skill. Let’s face it, the best way to learn is to do and working inside Empower Network, there’s logs of things to learn and lots of ways to apply what you learn.