What is Search Engine Optimization(SEO)?
To put it in simple words, let me give you an example. Suppose I create a Website regarding e-Commerce, just like amazon.com, flipkart.com, etc. During initial stages, neither my Website nor my company is well known to the customers. When the question of publicizing the Website comes up, Search Engine Optimization is of great help. If my Website is completely Search Engine Optimized, links to my Website appear in first page of the search engines.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results.In other words, SEO is used to increase the page rank of a Website. Higher the page rank, probability of my website appearing in the first page of search engine is higher. This in turn, is proportional to the number of users visiting my website. It plays a vital role in Internet marketing.
How SEO works?
The operations of SEO is based on certain rules. If the Webmaster follow these rules while creating the Website, rest of the work will be done by search engines.
Some of the rules are:
1. Home page and other landing pages of the Website must contain a 'title tag' which describes the website. This title tag is what we see when we search for some links in search engines. They appear on top of the browser when it is opened.
2. The description of each and every page must be specific. This description is called 'meta description' and this is what we see below the links displayed in search engines. Description is small paragraph that describes the content of the page.
3. Description and title tag must contain maximum but meaningful use of Keywords.
4. The content of the webpage must contain these Keywords in excess.
5. Link building is one of the popular methods, where in, appropriate links to other websites are provided from one site to another(external links), or within the site from one page to another(internal links).
6. Each page of a website shall have a unique URL.
There are many such rules to increase the page rank and hence the traffic of a Website. However, the above set of rules are mandatory.
First of all, the search engines must be made to crawl through our website. For this, we need to submit our sitemap to all the search engines. Google provides a handy tool called Webmasters for this, Yahoo and Bing can directly receive the URL and place in its directory. Search Engines might take some time to crawl through your website.
Google provides a tool called Google Adwords to analyze which keywords are being used by the users to enter my site. Being a good Webmaster, you can use the word which is most frequently used and place it in the title tag. This increases the popularity of you website.
After all this optimizations, you can verify the increase in the number of visitors to your website by using Google Analytics, again a Google tool to analyze where the traffic is coming from, how many users visited, how long they stayed back in your website etc. Also there are many websites for this type of analysis, for example, Alexa, Trafficwala etc.
Nowadays, SEO marketing is very useful and it is obviously used in almost all websites. However, all these pages does not appear on the first page. The reason for this is, search engine uses a complex algorithms to decide which website should be placed higher and which one to be lower.
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