The Basics of SEO

the basics of seoThe basics of SEO. But first, what is it? SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization.

It is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural,” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”), search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users (source).

The basics of SEO include providing certain content and elements contained in the code of your web page or blog post. Having the basics will dramatically improve your chances of getting ranked on top search engines like Google or Yahoo!.

Simple Basics of SEO

KEY WORD. Before you do a blog post or web page, decide on the key word you want to use. A key word is what someone types into a search engine. Anytime you do a Google search, that is essentially the “key words” and will bring up the related content. In this post, the key words I chose to use is the basics of SEO.

THE TITLE. The title of your blog post or web page needs to contain your key words. Take a look at the title of this post, it matches pretty much exactly the key words I am targeting.

FIRST & LAST. The concept of “first & last” is that the key words need to be in the first sentence or paragraph of your blog post AND in the last sentence of paragraph.

BOLD, UNDERLINE, & ITALIC. These relate to the HTML coding in your blog post. You need to BOLD, UNDERLINE, and ITALICIZE your key words at least once throughout the content of your post. If you scan above, I already did that for this post.

HEADINGS. Again, this relates to the HTML coding using the H1, H2, and H3 tags. The title automatically counts for the H1 tag, but you also need to include an H2 and H3. If you notice, the beginning of this section included an H2 title with the key words I’m targeting.

WORD COUNT. Your blog post needs to contain at least 300-500 words. Include your key words for every 100 words of content. So if you have a blog post that’s 500 words long, in my case the “basics of SEO” need to be somewhere in the post at least five different times. 300-500 words at the most is ideal, but it’s okay if you have more…just include more of the key words.

Advanced Basics of SEO

(Notice the use of the H2 heading for this section?)

THE “ALT” FEATURE. Including an image that relates to your blog post is ideal. Within the HTML coding of the image includes an “ALT” feature. Take a minute and highlight your mouse over the image above…you’ll notice the words “the basics of SEO” appear. That is the “ALT” feature in action. Your image tag should look something like this: img src=”link-of-picture here.jpg” alt=”the basics of SEO”.

INTERNAL LINK. Somewhere in your blog post you’ll need to link to other content within your website. A lot of people include at the end of their post a “Related Content” section that links to similar blog post within the same website done in the past. If you scroll down, you’ll see an example.

NO FOLLOW. “No follow” again relates to HTML coding, but this time in external links. In the second paragraph of this post, I quoted Wikipedia for the definition of SEO. At the end I linked to the source, which if clicked will take you OUT (external) of my site and to Wikipedia where I got the information. Within the code, I entered the feature rel=”nofollow” which basically doesn’t provide a backlink or juice for Wikipedia. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

There you have it! The Basics of SEO. In your effort to get your website up in rankings, I hope that this gives you a good starting point. If you found value of this content, please leave your comment below or share with your friends on your favorite social media sites.

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