SEO is about ensuring the pages of your website are readily found by search engines and rank highly.
Everyone uses search engines to find websites, so it naturally follows that you want to ensure your website appears in search engine results.
People believe that the results at the top of the list are the "best" - and whilst in general, we can say that they are most likely to match their search query, that doesn't necessarily mean they're the best company to do the job!
That said, moving from position 4 to 3 in Google results produces a doubling in traffic, moving from 3 to 2 produces another doubling of traffic and being top of the list can produce even more than twice the traffic from the next result down. As such, good SEO is inherently linked to generating more traffic.
Good search engine optimisation involves techniques done both on your own site and elsewhere off your site.
For example, having a link to your site coming from a high-ranking popular subject-authority site will help raise your own ranking.
Whilst there's a growing list of indicators that search engines use to determine the ranking of a page for any particular query, these are some of the more popular things that you can optimise that are likely to produce results:
- Z Page Title
- Z Page Contents
- Z Meta Tags (not meta keywords!)
- Z Image ALT tags
- Z Referring Links
- Z Links out to other sites
- Z Links within your own site to more related information
- Z Taxonomies (Categories and Tags)
- Z Good Content Structure
Free Guide to SEO from Urban Haze
Free SEO Check from Urban Haze
If your site is running WordPress and you're looking for a way to easily grow Internal links to improve your SEO, you might want to consider LinkWhisper which makes it easy to add links within your own website.
Keep in mind that Search Engine Optimisation is only one piece of the whole puzzle.
Don't try to trick it, you'll get ranked down or even de-listed for trying to cheat!
There are lots of companies offering SEO services out there - keep in mind that the Search Engines decide where you appear, so nobody can guarantee you results, and results are likely to change over time. Good SEO needs good ongoing maintenance to keep track of competition, algorithm changes and keyword rankings.
