SEO

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is the process of getting a website to rank higher in search engine results.

It is said that SEO is the holy grail for businesses. If a website ranks well with the main keywords of an industry, then it has a great chance of increasing profits. There are, of course, many other factors to consider once a website has achieved high ranking in the search engines. But worry not, we will cover everything in time!

To better optimize our site for the search engines, we have to pay attention to two things:

SEO Factors

With On-Page Factors, we mean all elements included in our website, including code, text and images. We can control these factors.
With Off-Page Factors, we mean everything that is “said” about us. This could be in the form of links on other websites, comments, Facebook likes, tweets, etc. We may not be able to fully control these factors, but we can most definitely influence their impact.

Let’s explain what everything means and see what we can do to help our website rank higher.

On-Page Factors

We can say that On-Page Factors are all the elements that encompass our page. It starts with HTML coding. These are:

  • The meta title
  • The meta description
  • The meta keywords
  • and H1

Then we have all the actual content text; which is, in my opinion, the most important part of our whole page.

And last but not least, we also have images and their alt-text.

Off-Page Factors

Having a website on the Internet is exactly the same as having a real-life retail store. The only difference is that our website is “movable”, while physical buildings are not. At least not in this world :P

When starting a traditional business, any expert will tell you that the key is “Location! Location! Location!”.  It is very important, since location can make or break one’s business success. With a website, we don’t have that choice, we start from the ghetto!

Once we create a brand new website, we have no real way of getting people to find out about it. No one’s going to stumble upon us by accident and pay a visit. Search engines don’t know about it to include it in their results and no one -except perhaps our closest friends- will even know about it.

As we start advertising though, more people will drop by, other web owners will give us links and search engines will start to realize we are valuable to users. This is why getting search engine value (the so-called “link juice”) is an organic process; both on-going and long term.

On-Page and Off-Page Factors are equally important in effective Search Engine Optimization; this is why it’s crucial to focus on both. There’s no point in having our web-page optimized for search engines, if no other site links to us and vice versa.

If you haven’t got a clue what some of these terms mean, don’t worry! I will explain them sooner than you think! Subscribe to my RSS Feed to stay up to date with my new articles.

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Angel

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