What is SEO and why is it important to my website?
The term SEO gets thrown around a lot on the internet and website and blog owners will probably see and hear the term the most. However, many people don’t know exactly what SEO is and what it does for your website or blog. This article will help those who do not know what SEO is and why it’s so important to each website and blog.
The term SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. If you find yourself asking what exactly that is and what it does for a website or blog, then I am going to try to explain it in as easy to understand way as possible.
SEO is basically the techniques and practices of making your website or blog rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERP’s) when someone searches for something.
As a direct result of a website or blog site’s increased rankings in the search engine results pages, that website or blog will receive more visitors or “Traffic” as it’s usually called. This is because the higher up the search engine results pages a website or blog is, the more people will see the listing for that particular site and because more people will see that site’s search result, more people will click on the link and visit that website or blog.
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There are many things that you can do to SEO a website or blog, some are good and are accepted by the search engine websites as good practices and these type of techniques and practices are called “White Hat” SEO. The SEO techniques and practices that the search engine websites consider bad are called “Black Hat” SEO.
White hat SEO methods will not harm your website or blog if they are done correctly and if they are done right, the search rankings of your website or blog will improve. Black hat SEO methods might get your website or blog a boost in the search rankings at first, but once the search engine websites find out about them being used, your website or blog can get penalized in the search rankings or even removed from them completely.
Getting your website or blog removed from a search engines rankings otherwise called it’s “Index” means that your website or blog will not have any of it’s pages found anywhere in the search rankings. This usually spells the death of a website or blog since it will not receive any visitors, or “Traffic” from that search engine.
The traffic that a website or blog receives from search engines usually accounts for a large part of the traffic that a given site receives, so losing that source of traffic can mean that that particular site will loose the majority of it’s visitor traffic.
We would never want anyone to have their website or blog penalized by the search engine websites, so we will never give and information on how to do black hat (Bad) SEO. We want your website or blog to reach it’s peak and stay at the top of the search engines ranking pages, so we will only share information about white hat (Good) SEO.
Now that you have a basic idea as to what SEO is and what it can do for your website or blog if it is done correctly, we will give you a short list of a few of the SEO techniques and methods that can help your website or blog improve it’s search rankings and help you to get more visitors to your site.
Some good SEO techniques and practices:
Use good and concise headlines for your articles, posts and pages.
Name and tag the images on your site properly and accurately.
Produce good and relevant content regularly, and update article, posts and pages as needed.
Try to post articles with a word count above 500 words with 300 being a minimum.
Links related articles , pages and posts together across your site.
Use names / titles in the permalinks for your articles, pages and posts.
These are just a few of some good SEO techniques and practices, we will have other articles that go more into depth on these and more SEO methods in future articles. One key word of advice that I would like to point out as being perhaps the best SEO practice, make sure to produce only good quality content for your website or blog.
Producing good content that is well written, correctly spelled with proper grammar, appropriate images when needed and is original / unique will be the best SEO technique that any website or blog owner can do.
To learn more about SEO you can check out our SEO page.
Good Luck and may your website or blog reach the Apex in it’s Niche!