How Does SEO Work?
By now, you should be aware that your website is not the only one of its kind. There can be thousands of others websites offering the same products or information as yours do. But one strategy that can help you stay ahead of the game is SEO. This can help improve search engine ranking of your website, resulting in increased traffic. If you are still not convinced that SEO is what you need to become successful with your online goals, then it is a must that you learn about how it works.
Understanding SEO Services
Search engine optimized websites are more likely to rank number one in Google, Yahoo or Bing. Again, there can be thousands of websites competing for that spot. But if you will not use SEO, you don’t stand a chance against the others. Listed below are the results that you can expect to happen if you will use SEO for your website.
- Improve search engine ranking. Search engines do not show results in alphabetical order. They rank web pages in terms of their relevance to the entered keyword or keyword phrase. The websites with the highest ranking will appear on top. So how do search engines measure relevancy? Simple, they look into the content and evaluate credibility of the websites. This is where SEO comes in handy. SEO will help ensure that your website is both relevant and credible.
- Improve content quality. Through application of SEO, the content of your website will be enhanced to meet the requirements of major search engines. Relevancy is just one criteria used by them in ranking web pages. There is also a need to update content in order to let search engines know that your website is still active. SEO makes use of methods that will allow your website to get easily indexed by the search engines.
- Internet marketing. If you use your website to sell or market products and services, then you can count on SEO to increase awareness about your offers. Through SEO, you are able to reach your target audience and convert them into customers.
On-Page Optimization
This is an SEO strategy that influences search engine results through factors that you can control. With on-page optimization, you will have to work with the following:
- Keywords. Keywords are the focus of the content. It can be a single word or a phrase that is frequently searched for by the users. SEO will make use of keywords that are not only relevant to the product or service you are offering, but also are popular to your target audience.
- Keyword density. This is simply the number of times the keyword or keyword phrase is used in the article. Search engines do not have the same keyword density requirements. But Google recently changed its algorithm, and pushed for minimal use of keywords in order that articles will have a natural flow.
- HTML codes. These are the codes used so that your website will appear the way you want to. SEO is also about modifying HTML codes in a manner that will meet the standard set forth by the search engines.
- Meta description. This appears right below the title tag in the search results. By creating an SEO-friendly title tag, you are able to convince the audience that your website is worth their time.
Off-Page Optimization
This is an SEO strategy that influences search engine results, but the factors are not controlled by you or the codes in your website. In order to understand better how off-page optimization works, below are a few examples:
- Backlinking. Google likes to show the “popular” websites at the top of search engines. In the realm of influence, the strongest domains produce the strongest results. In terms of Google, this refers to authority sites. A link from an authority site is worth much more than a link from a site that no one knows about. What is an authority site? Some examples of authority sites are wikipedia, facebook, or any other high pagerank (PR) site. PR is a calculation provided by Google to assess how important the page is. In essence, you want links from the popular websites to your website because that boosts your authority.
- Anchor Text. This is a term that many SEO beginners often don’t understand or just don’t put enough emphasis on. In fact, it’s a key element to any off page optimization strategy. So what is Anchor Text? It’s the text that you click on that sends you to a link. For instance, if I make the words Best SEO Services Calgary a link, then Best SEO Services Calgary is the anchor text of that link. You don’t want all the anchor texts to be the same. A good distribution is important for proper off page SEO
- Linking Root Domains. The term sounds sophisticated but it really just means a link coming from different websites. For instance, if you have more than one link coming from one website, each of the link will count as a backlink. However, the backlinking power of each link after the first is significantly reduced. Making sure you have links coming from different websites is important.
Conclusion
SEO is not just one, but a blend of several techniques that can allow your website to appear number in the search results. It opens the possibility for higher traffic and conversation rate. All these can be learned, but will require a great deal of time and effort. A website owner like you can have a lot of other things to deal with, and therefore asking for help from an SEO expert will not sound bad at all.