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Introduction to SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
 

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the optimization of your site to achieve high search engine results. Originally, SEO only consisted of using lots of keywords in your textual content and meta tags, but it has become a lot more complicated over the years.

Content Optimization

The First step to optimizing your website for search engines involves your own website. In general, the more textual content you have on your site, the better. You also need to change all of your meta tags and page titles to reflect your page’s content. Make sure your articles contain the keywords you are trying to rank for but don’t use an unnatural amount of keywords.

Make sure to use “alt” tags for images and other media. URLs should also include keywords and each specific page should have its title included in the URL unless the title is too long. If the title is too long, then just keep the important keywords in a legible condensed title.

Remove all frames from your site of both sorts: iframes and frames. Frames cannot be read by search engines and they are no longer used in commercial web design. They can be used for personal sites such as photo albums, but personal sites generally don’t need to be optimized for search engines anyways.

Link Building

Getting links is another important aspect in optimizing your site for search engines. Although this could be considered marketing, link-building is often associated with SEO.

Generally, you want links from important sources on the web. Sites with a high Google PageRank tend to equate with higher search results in Google which equates to quality over quantity. There are many different methods employed by people to get links such as link exchange, linkbait, article marketing, etc. Alot of them overlap but they all sum up to having awesome content.

Note that other search engines don’t use link popularity as a measure for search engine ranking but Google has a huge search engine market share.

Note* These are the technical basics of SEO; however, having awesome content that is unique to your site is still key. This is just optimization. SEO is more complex than this simple introduction, but the basics of SEO can be easily covered and implemented by anyone with many benefits to their websites.