SEO, 5 Ways to look at your content like the search engines do.

Effective search engine optimization requires that you know how search engines work, how does a search engine decide which websites to display in its organic search results? Well to answer that question, you will need to know how a search engine works and how it looks at your content. You must also bear in mind that every search engine out there has its own search algorithm. There are various search engine optimization techniques that can be used, but until you fully understand how a search engine works, you won’t be very successful at search engine marketing. Your job is to really look at your website’s content the way search engines do.

1. Consider Keywords and Key Phrases Carefully

Search engine optimization is all about keywords and key phrases. A keyword and a key phrase are words that a person performing an online search via a search engine might use. If your website is optimized for these keywords or phrases chances of your website showing up in a search engine’s organic search results increase. To a search engine a keyword is just a string of text that a user enters. And just like the simple search tool you use to find files on your computer, a search engine will look for occurrences of the search string in its database of indexed websites. When someone (a searcher) searches using terms (keywords) that are optimized on a website, it will show up on the search engine’s search results page.  There is however one catch! Search engines look at more than just keywords. Each search engine has its own closely guarded search engine algorithm, which really decides, which pages rank higher than others. Keywords and Key phrases will increase your chances, but do not guarantee a high rank.

2. Provide Good Information

The oldest and probably the best way to increase web traffic to your website is to provide good solid information. To a search engine graphics and animation means nothing, at least with the current technology.  It wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a picture of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. What a search engine does is really read the text description of the picture, to distinguish between the two. A website that has rich content will be readily acceptable by search engines. This is why using keywords and key phrases within the title of your webpage along with its meta tag and content, makes it easier for search engines to detect you.

3. Obtain Backlinks and Build credibility

You may have heard of the term ‘link building’, which means building back links to your website. Search engines today are more sophisticated than what they used to be, merely adding keywords won’t do much good if other websites don’t recommend you. In an effort to provide relevant search results, search engines will rank your website on the basis of the number of websites that link back to you. The more websites that link back the higher your site will rank. Because each back link acts as a vote.

In order to increase web traffic to your website you will need to get back links, and the best ones are from high traffic websites.  These are usually websites that rank high on search engine results. For this you will need to measure web traffic of various high ranking websites which are relevant to the service you provide.

4. Optimize your website in HTML

Even today search engines such as Google and Yahoo prefer HTML over any other webpage format. To a search engine a webpage’s design needs to be simple and neat, simply because it can’t make sense of animated banners, menus or flash intros. If you want to be ranked high on search engine results it’s best to optimize your website in HTML.

5. Put Your Content on Blogs and Article Directories

Successful search engine marketing today relies a lot on blogs and article directories. A search engine optimization campaign is incomplete without proper keyword optimized blogs and articles. This is because blogs and article directories help you increase back links to your webpage. When you publish an article to an article directory or a blog post to a blog, there is usually a back link that is included along with your article and post. These back links are what raise your webpage ranking. If proper search engine optimization techniques are used within your articles and blogs, it can raise your ranking significantly.

image credits to Bernardo Borghetti

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