Learning SEO Basics
TweetSo what exactly is Search Engine Optimization, commonly refered to as SEO? It is when you optimize your site to rank highly in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. There are other engines out there as well, but those are the Big 3 that really matter (and out of that group, Google is really the only one that matters.)
The reason you want to learn SEO basics is that it is the best way to get targeted traffic. The users finding your site will do so after entering specific keywords that are tailored to what your site is all about. You don't have to pay for this traffic and if you keep up your rankings you can ensure a steady flow of new visitors for a long period of time.
If you have been reading at all about SEO, then you probably have seen the term SERPs. SERPs is an acronym for Search Engine Results Pages. These are simply the pages full of site listings that is returned when you query the engine for a keyword.
There are two types of SEO that we need to worry about when optimizing our site. On-page and off-page.
On-Page
On-page refers to the content actually on your site. While it isn't as important as off-page optimization, it will still play a role in how high your site ranks in the SERPs. The basics of on-page SEO optimizing are keyword density, meta tags, internal linking structure, and title tags.
Off-Page
The most important part of your SEO campaign is off-page. This entails building up the link popularity of your site with both quantity and quality of sites that send links back to yours. If you can get links back from high quality, high PR, and relevant authority sites that use the keywords you are going for in the anchor text, it's not going to take long for your site to rocket up the SERPs.
Those are the basics of what optimizing SEO is all about. We will get into more details about both on-page and off-page with additional articles down the line.