Understanding Why You Need SEO
Before you can understand the reasons for using SEO, it might be good to
have a definition of what
SEO — search engine optimization — It will be easy to understand, so I’ll keep it simple.
SEO is the science of customizing elements of your web site to achieve the
best possible search engine ranking. That’s really all there is to search engine optimization. But as
simple as it sounds, don’t let it
fool you. Both internal and external elements of the site affect the way
it’s ranked in any given search
engine, so all of these elements should be taken into consideration. Good
SEO can be very difficult to
achieve, and great SEO seems pretty well impossible at times.
But why is search engine optimization so important? Think of it this way.
If you’re standing in a crowd
of a few thousand people and someone is looking for you, how will they find
you? In a crowd that
size, everyone blends together.
Now suppose there is some system that separates groups of people. Maybe if
you’re a woman you’re
wearing red and if you’re a man you’re wearing blue. Now anyone looking for
you will have to look
through only half of the people in the crowd.
You can further narrow the group of people to be searched by adding
additional differentiators until
you have a small enough group that a search query can be executed and the desired
person can be
easily found.
Your web site is much like that one person in the huge crowd. In the larger
picture your site is
nearly invisible, even to the search engines that send crawlers out to
catalog the Web. To get your
site noticed, even by the crawlers, certain elements must stand out. And
that’s why you need
search engine optimization.
By accident your site will surely land in a search engine. And it’s likely
to rank within the first few
thousand results. That’s just not good enough. Being ranked on the ninth or
tenth page of search
results is tantamount to being invisible. To be noticed, your site should
be ranked much higher.
Ideally you want your site to be displayed somewhere on the first three
pages of results. Most people
won’t look beyond the third page, if they get even that far. The fact is,
it’s the sites that fall on the
first page of results that get the most traffic, and traffic is translated
into revenue, which is the ultimate
goal of search engine optimization.
To achieve a high position in search results, your site must be more than
simply recognizable by a
search engine crawler. It must satisfy a set of criteria that not only gets
the site cataloged, but can
also get it cataloged above most (if not all) of the other sites that fall
into that category or topic.
Some of the criteria by which a search engine crawler determines the rank
your site should have in
a set of results include:
_ Anchor text
_ Site popularity
_ Link context
_ Topical links
_ Title tags
_ Keywords
_ Site language
_ Content
_ Site maturity
There are estimated to be at least several hundred other criteria that
could also be examined before
your site is ranked by a search engine. Some of the criteria listed also
have multiple points of view.
For example, when looking at link context, a crawler might take into
consideration where the link
is located on the page, what text surrounds it, and where it leads to or
from.
These criteria are also different in importance. For some search engines,
links are more important
than site maturity, and for others, links have little importance. These
weights and measures are constantly
changing, so even trying to guess what is most important at any given time
is a pointless exercise.
Just as you figure it out, the criteria will shift or change completely.
By nature, many of the elements are likely to have some impact on your site
ranking, even when
you do nothing to improve them. However, without your attention, you’re
leaving the search ranking
of your site to chance. That’s like opening a business without putting out
a sign. You’re sure to
get some traffic, but because people don’t know you’re there, it won’t be
anything more than the
curiosity of passersby.Jerri L. Ledford
Nice post dude! thank you!
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That's all
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