Beginners SEO

To fully understand SEO, you first need to understand how the search engines determine which websites to display when you enter a search term into the search engine. Search engines are nothing more than a huge index of all websites on the internet. This index is organized into groups of websites that are optimized for individual keyword phrases (what you type into the search engine search box).

So how does the search engine determine what websites to display for a particular keyword phrase? Websites are ranked according to a couple factors. There are on-page factors which includes the title, description, domain name and header tags used on a website along with off-page factors that are primarily backlinks to a site. Backlinks are pointers to a particular website from another website. These pointers are further optimized based on the text used for the link. I know, you are saying this is getting confusing but allow me to break it down some for you.

On-page factors for website optimization:

• The title of a website is one of the factors search engines consider when indexing a site. The title is what shows at the top of your browser window when visiting a website.
• The next tag that is taken into account is the description of a website. This is the text that is displayed when a website is displayed in the search engine results page (SERP).
• The domain name of a website can be an important factor for the search engines (more on this later).
• And finally, the header tags on a website are looked at with some weight when indexing a site.

These are all factors a good web designer / webmaster should take into consideration when building a website. All too often these easy to incorporate tags (with the exception of domain name) are overlooked thus the website will have a difficult time ranking high in search results.

Off-page factors to consider are backlinks pointed to a particular website or page on a website. Backlinks are essentially hyper-links on a website pointing to another website which can be either a domain name (www.example.com) or text links (BestPlumbing). Backlinks are a very important piece of the website ranking puzzle. Search engines look at backlinks as votes for a particular website. The more backlinks a website has, the higher the authority of the website.

Having both on-page and off-page factors optimized for a particular keyword phrase(s) is SEO. The more optimized these are, the higher the ranking of a website for a particular keyword phrase. And a higher ranking means more traffic a website will get, thus creating more customers or visitors.

This is a simplified description of SEO but I hope you get the idea. Creating a website these days is a good thing, creating a website that gets lots of targeted traffic is MUCH better!