What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
How SEO works
You might think of a search engine as a website you visit to type (or speak) a question into a box and Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or whatever search engine you’re using magically replies with a long list of links to webpages that could potentially answer your question.
Not so.
A search engine has a database of information it keeps in its index. That database is organized in such a way that humanlike humans can easily find what they are looking for. There are several pieces of a puzzle that go into Google, Yahoo, Bing, and the like to give you your answer.
Checking your keyword competition is vital. For instance, you don’t necessarily want to use the keyword “car” as your keyword phrase. (Besides, how many people car?) You want to focus on the keyword phrase ” Explorer car.
Always take time to check your search engine results. It might save you from some Later.
Some people think that if their web site has a high listing in the Search Engines they can forget about further promoting their site. Don’t get yourself confused. As you promote your web site keep in mind that some search engines are above the rest.
You’ve got to check to see who is ranked if you want to get a high listing. If you haven’t checked recently then you may be wondering what has changed in your keyword phrases that have caused you to drop in the rankings.
When you check to see your search engine ranking, you are basically looking at your listing as it was 6 months ago. You can look at your page specifically. When you do a search for the number of times a term is searched for, you get a feel for how competitive it is. This number will be higher for the term you are promoting.
Then you are going to read the description in the search engine results. This is sometimes called the organic results. The number of times the keyword is searched for is included in this figure.
The next figure gives you the search volume: This is the amount of people that search for the keyword on their own personal computers. The organic results are all separate and may or may not contain your web site.
The last figure is the KEI: Keyword Effectiveness Index. This is the ratio of the frequency of use to the count of actual searches for the key words. The higher the KEI, the more popular the keywords must be. This is why choosing keywords can be so complicated.
I recommend that you start by keying in the keywords that you think will be easiest to promote. You can always stop at it and do more research later. Start looking for tools that will help you to look up KEI for those keywords.
Choose a list of keywords that you think will be easy to promote. Don’t dig deep – you want to promote your best stuff right away. When you have a list of about 5 – 10 keywords, you can start promotions and advertising for all of them using those keywords as the anchor text of your links.
Now you need backlinks. Obviously you want as many backlinks from other websites to maximize the benefit of your efforts. You can create backlinks by simply exchanging links with other webmasters and or start writing articles with your link in them and submitting them to article directories.
Sometimes it is best to use those keywords which have a high KEI – they are worth going for. Otherwise work on those keywords which have low KEI – they are going to be a lot easier to promote.
You’ve got to consider the KEI figure for your keywords. That’s the value that the keywords have. You want to have keywords with high KEI figure; high KEI suggests they are valuable. When you use keywords with high KEI, it is because you’ve got competitors and they are using those keywords and you can never quite get ahead of them. When you use keywords with low KEI, it is because there aren’t many competitors and it is easy to promote. You’ve got to make sure you have a good spread of keywords that fit this criteria. Tools that can help with this are beyond the scope of this discussion and beyond the scope of this article.
OK, to proceed, you now want to get some useful backlinks to your website. I recommend you learn ways to get these links quickly and efficiently. When you get a way to get one-way backlinks to your site, it is toward the top of the search engine results. For instance, enter “more info here” in the Google search engine and the first site that appears on the list is your website. By getting a link on that first-page ranking by any means is almost like having a vote of confidence – if you’re getting a lot of votes then you know you’ve got a good site and the search engines recognize that too.
Now you’ve got a handful of keywords that you want to have good search engine rankings for.
