Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the backbone of internet marketing. There are other ways to get recognition and traffic for your site, but there is no substitute for ranking highly in the major search engines. SEO is much like investing for the future of your website. Paid traffic and other short-term solutions will disappear without intense effort and funding. But optimizing your website continually over time will yield positive results and resulting traffic for years to come.
Building Blocks of SEO
To use search engine optimization successfully, you have to understand and implement what the search engines are looking for. Unfortunately, there is no published list of ways to get into the search engines’ good graces, so you must rely on the experience of others and the time-tested methods that have worked in the past. While the algorithm for popularity in the search engines fluctuates slightly on a regular basis, the building blocks of SEO have remained the same.
Keyword Optimization
The first aspect of optimizing your website is to select a range of keyword to target in the engines. Your best option for a highly optimized website is to narrow your site contents down to a single niche and focus heavily on keywords within that niche to limit the competition from other, possibly larger and more funded, sites.
As you build your pages, work your keywords into the content and meta tags and descriptions. Ideally you can achieve 3-7% saturation with your particular keyword through the content, but the material should still read naturally for your website to be popular with readers. Rather than simply including a word or phrase throughout your text, attempt to use the keyword in your URL, site title and in headings and subheadings throughout to give your selected phrase as much power as possible in search results.
Fresh Content
Search engines, particularly Google, like sites that are continually updated with new content. Not only does the fresh content give you additional chances to use your selected keywords, it also helps to bring repeat traffic to the site as well as giving you new avenues to pursue within your niche. Depending on your niche, however, you can still do well with a static site if your market area and keyword is not heavily marketed by others.
Link Popularity
Finally, search engines like to see that the sites they consider high ranking based on keywords and content are indeed popular with visitors. To measure this component, search engines use link popularity or the number of links you have coming into your website. Presumably, the more websites linking to pages of your site, the more meaningful your content must be.
Not only does the number of back links make a difference in search engines, the quality of the links matter as well. A single link from an important or popular website is worth far more than a handful of links from new or untried websites.
In addition, recent changes by Google have discounted links that appear to be purchased rather than obtained naturally. The best links to your website, it seems, originate from the actual content on a single page that ranks highly in the search engines already. Site-wide and reciprocal links have diminished power in the current algorithm.
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