A Brief Introduction to SEO
If you are currently using any of the big search engines like Yahoo, Bing or Google, you obviously noticed that certain websites receive better placement on those results pages than others. With thousands upon thousands of results, have you ever wondered how the lucky ones get to the top of page one on those search results. The answer is simply search engine optimization (SEO). If your website has better search engine optimization than your competitors you will receive the higher position and in turn much more traffic. SEO can be done in quite a few different ways, here are a few SEO techniques that can help increase the ranking of your website.
URL Address and SEO Titles
The title of your webpage is much different from the heading of your webpage. When you do a search for a keyword, the major search engines try to match your query with a website whose title, URL address and heading match closely to it. If you have that search term in your URL address, and it matches the title of your webpage, the website will be given a significantly higher ranking than other websites in that same niche.
SEO Content
When you search for a term like dog training in the major search engines, they will try to match that particular term with keywords within the articles on websites. If the term appears in multiple articles on millions of websites, then the search engine will try to position the websites who have properly used keyword density within those articles, and rank them higher. Understanding the correct way to balance those searched keywords in content on your website will go a long way in helping you to achieve better rankings. SEO content can make or break your website, because if you stuff too many keywords in your articles, your ranking will most certainly drop in the rankings.
Multimedia SEO
You know whenever you are doing a search for a recipe or travel destinations how important it is that the website you visit have videos, pictures, or applications that can help you with your query. The search engines work the same way, and they reward websites that utilize multimedia on their websites because they place a higher value on these websites. The videos and pictures give the user a much better overall experience and the search engine is designed to identify those websites and give them a consistently higher result for visitors to enjoy. Having great keyword density and the keywords in your URL address are great starts, but if your website looks drab and boring, your visitors will not stay long and neither with the search engine spiders.
Updating Your Website
Nobody likes items that are stale, and that is exactly what happens to your website if you set it and forget it. You can not create a website and simply leave it in the hopes that traffic and ranking will increase on the quality design you put forth. People want to see the latest and greatest and are always looking for new information. If your website has updates, new information and customer interaction, the search engines will reward your website with a much higher ranking.