How To Understand SEO And Use It To Your Advantage
Posted on: 27 December 2015
If you have a website that isn't as popular as you might like, then you could benefit from the art of SEO, also known as search engine optimization. To help you get a better idea of whether SEO is right for you and how it can benefit your website, read on for some basic background information and tips:
The Basics
In order to understand how you can effectively use SEO strategies, you need to have a working knowledge of how search engines operate. Search engines effectively operate on two principles: crawling and ranking.
Search engines need to have information from just about every webpage out there in order to give users the answers they are looking for. To this end, search engines actively "crawl" through the internet from page to page, forming an extensive list of every website that they can find. This list is then drawn upon for the ranking step.
When it comes to figuring out which results a user wants to see when they enter a specific query, search engines will "rank" their list of webpages. To do this, it first eliminates all the websites that do not fit the category of your search, a criteria that is often determined by keywords. Second, it orders the remaining results into a list that will allow you to see the most popular (and ostensibly the most relevant) results first.
So how can you leverage this information to your advantage?
The Power of Keywords
When it comes to making sure that your website comes out ahead of the competition, utilizing the power of keywords is one of your most effective tools. If you have relevant and popular keywords associated with your website, then you will naturally get more traffic than an otherwise identical competitor.
However, this isn't as simple as it seems. It actually requires a fair bit of research and there are entire companies that exist solely to provide SEO keyword statistics to websites that want to get ahead of the game.
Not only do you need to identify keywords that are associated with your website – you need to make sure that they are keywords used by potential consumers (which are a lot more valuable than random visitors that have no intention of using your services) and that you can beat the competition within the scope of a single keyword.
For instance, if you offer services related to repairing phones and tablets, then you have two central keywords to choose from: "phone repair" and "tablet repair". While there might be an oversaturated market and a lot of competition for "phone repair," "tablet repair" might be relatively empty. Focusing on "tablet repair" will make your website a top contender among the search results for "tablet repair," while you might struggle to make the top ten pages for "phone repair," even if you dedicate all your resources to the topic.
Ultimately, there is a lot more that goes into SEO, and it will be difficult to master the field on your own. In many cases, consulting an SEO services expert will be the quickest and most efficient path to building a more popular website.
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