SEO Basics

When keywords or phrases are entered into a search engine search box, and the enter button is pushed, a list of results appears, displaying relevant websites to the keyword(s) being searched. This list is in order from most relevant to least relevant as deemed by the search engine, and not based on which company has spent the most money on an SEO campaign. These results are called the SERPs, or search engine results pages.

With SEO, a business cannot simply pay more money than another and be rated ahead of it on the SERP. In order for a business to be amongst the first results on a SERP, several aspects need to be carefully examined, and techniques must be properly implemented in order to create a website that is more visible to the search engines during a search.

Here are a few basic techniques that can be utilized to ensure a website’s visibility potential is maximized:

Keyword Research: Keyword research should be completed in order to include frequently searched keywords or phrases that are relevant to the website’s theme. More is explained about this below in the section titled keyword strategy.

Internal Linking: Cross linking between pages of the same website can help to provide links to the important pages, enhancing their visibility. Use keywords as the links to relevant pages. This is part of the internal linking structure, and helps with user and search engine navigation through your website.

Fresh Content: Updating content frequently keeps search engine spiders crawling back often, giving additional relevance to the website. This is why blogs are so important and are given so much emphasis.

Meta Data: Using relevant keywords in a webpage’s Meta data such as the title tag or meta description can also improve the relevance and visibility of a website. This is perhaps the most fundamental aspect of a good SEO foundation.

Keyword Strategy

All of these techniques can be quite effective at increasing traffic to a website. However, keyword research is one of the most important aspects that must be included in every SEO campaign. Most of the time people first create a website and then figure out that it is essential to have an SEO campaign in order to attract visitors. Although it is never too late to begin keyword research, it is easier to do before the website is designed.

To better understand how keyword research works, the process can be broken down into three steps:

1. Collection: the collecting of keywords relevant to the business, try to come up with at least 15-20 for starters.
2. Verifying popularity: refining the keyword list to keywords frequently searched on the target search engines. This involves keyword research tools that can ensure the validity of the keywords popularity.
3. Verifying competition: selecting keywords that are popular, but not as common as obvious, major keywords. Sometimes it pays to go after periphery keywords and focus your content development on those.
   
   

Following these steps will not only ensure that relevant keywords are selected, it will also ensure that there will be a balance of both relevant and competitive keywords selected for the website's content. This will provide the website with a competitive advantage against websites that have not taken these steps into consideration or implemented an SEO or SEM campaign. These are fundamental guidelines and will not merit instant results. However they are a necessary foundation to any good SEO campaign.