subject: How to Make Sense of SEO [print this page] SEO, or Search Engine Optimization refers to the techniques to increase Internet search traffic. There are numerous techniques to achieving this, some may be easier than others. In a few words, SEO increases your presence on search engines which increases your traffic numbers. The goal for all SEO is to get your website to appear as number one for searches.
A fantastic first step is to ensure your blog is optimized correctly. Make sure you use appropriate meta keywords and meta descriptions so that search engines are able to spider your website correctly. This is a onetime thing, once it's been set upcorrectly you do not have to do it another time. If you write about politics, write a description, a title and some keywords all targeting your topic. The meta title and description will be shown in search engine results so make sure it is relevant and correct.
Furthermore, be sure to write good, unique content. Copy and pasting your content from other sources will get you penalized by search engines. Search engines have become highly developed and intelligent. Their aim is to offer the best content to users so duplicate content is not in their interest. Thus, if you copy content you will be penalized by search engine rankings.
Building links to your site is the next step once you have optimized your website correctly. Search engines determine how good your site is by how many inbound links the site has. I.e., your website has more links than another, search engines will rank you higher and you will get more traffic. Writing good quality, keyword rich content will result in this process happening naturally but it may take a while for search engines to find you. To speed it up you can try some of the following techniques.
Firstly, write original article and submit them to article directories. Sometimes you may find it difficult for your articles to be accepted because they must be reviewed by human reviewers. But, for every article that you get accepted, you also get a couple of links back to your website. Search engines really like this. You should see SEO as a game - always trying to get quality links from quality sources.
You are also able to build links to your website by commenting on forums and blogs. Many blog owners will allow you to link back to your site with a dofollow link. Dofollow is the colloquial name given to links that search engines will take notice of, compared to nofollow links. Nofollow was created because people would pay for links to their websites or spam lots of links. Search engines will ignore nofollow links which means you get no SEO benefit. Try to find blogs that may allow you to link to your site. This is good because it will give your website SEO benefits and also increases the awareness and lets you to network with the blogosphere. The comments ought to be genuine and relevant to the content. In the majority of cases, writing something self-promotional (such as: "please look at my homepage") will not get accepted and you will have wasted effort and time. You should always be a helpful.
Furthermore, you may decide to use social book marking tools to bookmark to your content. You should not spam your website too much though because the admins for the book marking sites will likely block your website from being added. But similar to directories, you will get a good inbound link from a good quality site. Well established websites have greater weight given to them by search engines. Effectively this means you will get more search engine optimization benefit from an established website than a new one. In other words, a link from a popular online book marking site will give your site more benefits than a smaller website.
One last tip is to submit your website to online directories. They can be annoying to setup but you can get a good inbound link for your website if you manage it. Many of the directories are well established. Although there are usually various submission options. There tends to be different payment options. The three options tend to be: paid for, free with reciprocal links and free without reciprocal links. Paying for links can be quite expensive but you will get fast tracked into the directory. Many of the higher ranked directories only offer paid for submissions. A free link may take months to be approved (as there is often a long waiting list for websites to be accepted). Unfortunately, reciprocal links negate the SEO benefit of the link because they are not one-way. You may find that they are useful for referral traffic but for SEO they are not useful.
The hints above should help your search engine rankings and improve your traffic. However you should also definitely be using services to monitor and report your SEO efforts and Internet traffic. This way you will be able to see what has the most benefit and what you can focus more on.
