What Does SEO Stand For? | Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is an important part of website marketing. As a web developer will be asked how you can help make this website get to the top of the search engines. There are many different techniques that can be used to get to the top. Coding your website with certain tags and attributes can help. The best way to get to the top is research.
Search Engines is a Mystery Logarithm
No one knows how a search engine works. Web developers have been trying to crack this logarithm for years. But they have developed a pretty good idea on what’s important to have in your website. Research and more research are required when pursuing this technique. You need to find out what works and what doesn't. But be careful what you read. Some techniques will work incredible fast, but it might be a way to trick the search engine. These techniques are usually called Black Hat Techniques. This can end up hurting your website in the long run. SEO takes time, if you do it correctly and stay in the rules you will have more success. Using patiance and correct techniques are called White Hat.
Search Engine Bots or Search Engine Spider
Search engines read your website like a person would. They send out website readers called search bots or spiders that read your content. They only care about the content of the webpage. They don't look at your images or look at your sites design. Keep this in mind that you only want great content on your website. It is more important to have great content than a lot of content. Search bots love great content and if you are using images or flash, code your alt tags to describe your images. Not only does this help accessible visitors, but it gives a description to the search bot.
Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions
Fill out your meta keywords and meta descriptions. These don't help a lot for ranking purposes, but they do help. Meta Keywords should only be keywords that reflect your page. Don't stuff your keyword section with words that have nothing to do with your page. Search Engines will penalize you for this. Same goes with the meta description. Make is short and promising to what the webpage is about. This is the description that comes up on the search, use for marketing.
Keywords are Key in Title Tags
Target keywords that reflect what your page is about. You will have different keywords for each page on your site. The search bot likes important data at the beginning of the webpage. This goes for your title tag of your webpage. Title tags are close to the most important element for SEO. Put one or two keywords in the title tag of your webpage. This is major bonus points for SEO. And name your webpage file with keywords. This is also more bonus points. Having all your data in the front of the page gives the search bot an easy target to hit.
Keep Your Code Clean and Validate
The best way to keep it clean is to follow the W3C validation process. If it is hard to read, then it is worse for a search bot. Search bots don't like to dig. Keep your code clean and organized. Use H1 tags on important topics and use bold for small important subjects. This can indicate what the search bot needs to pay attention.
What Does SEO Stand for Summary
Some of these techniques are just the basics of SEO. SEO is a never ending research web marketing technique. It takes practice and decisions. Developers doing code need to have some of this knowledge when developing sites. You don’t' want to hurt your site or your customers site by coding it in a non search bot friendly way. Keep to the basic techniques. These techniques take time, but you will be recognized in the long run. If you want to push your webpage to another level, get other sites to like to you. But be careful you only want high page ranked sites that have similar content. Like your website content, the same goes for links. It is better to have less high ranked sites, then hundred of websites that have nothing to do with your content.
