The reasons for SEO’s consistent popularity are obvious. Due to the Internet’s steadily growing nature the numbers of distinct URL addresses keep growing from the millions to hundreds of millions, and eventually into the billions. The internet has rapidly become a place of extreme competition for the attention of web surfers everywhere. If we factor in the fact that this same competitiveness for attention also made web advertising an equally fierce landscape that also gives site owners the burden of high spending cost, the need to keep a page well optimized becomes obvious, along with the immense popularity and importance of SEO.
Thus, as a new graduate a of university, college or an online education program you need to get a firm grasp on the essentials of sound SEO and how you can apply it to increasing readership, sales, reputation and popularity in your web based niche or the sites and platforms.
Remember, learning to do this and understanding SEO well will become increasingly crucial as the web grows in business and promotional importance, and new employers, as well as potential clients of your own education based career/business will almost certainly demand that you demonstrate to them your expertise in optimization’s latest, most important fundamentals and tactics.
Basics
SEO is not a one-time effort. It’s an ongoing process that evolves and leaves you having to evolve with it. Your competitors will constantly be trying to raise their own rank profiles and in order to keep up, you will constantly need to do the same thing. Another important basic point is that SEO is not elaborate rocket science. Most of its essential components are fairly straightforward and only difficult in that they require a large amount of effort.
No Spam
This is now the most important rule of optimization that there is. At one time, SEO “experts” could manipulate search engines quite easily into giving them high rank by creating an artificially derived perception of popularity on the web, leading to higher search rankings. Spam SEO tactics were powerful because they fooled search algorithms into “thinking” that a page was valuable based on narrow metrics like numerous links form other sites and lots of searched for keywords inside the page’s content.
This is no longer the case and modern algorithms are far more nuanced in how they analyze your site. If you use optimization spam to try developing rank, they will almost certainly detect its low quality and either ban your pages or completely de-rank you and destroy all your work at getting noticed.
Content is Crucial
The search engines want your site content to be valuable to their search users; they want to give rank to pages that deliver information of high value and high relevance based on what some random Google, Yahoo or Bing user was looking for.
Develop your content well and focus more of your optimization campaign’s energy into it than you would anywhere else. If you’re running an information site, then you’ll have the content anyway, so make it good. If your website is directed more towards offering a product or service, then make sure that you quickly develop a blog component where plenty of free information content is being posted regularly. This will lead to higher ranking on search results, and those will lead visitors to your content pages, where hopefully they can develop enough confidence in you and your expertise to click through to your sales pages. This increases the likelihood of trusting you enough to eventually buy.
Interconnect as Frequently as Possible
Another major component of SEO is link building, but in this case it should be slightly expanded to encompass a more general strategy of interconnection.
In its more essential form, link building consists of doing everything possible to create a list of links to your pages from the pages of other sites with good reputation and relevance to your niche, at least on the page where they’re linking back to you.
However, in order to build backlinks, you can’t simply spam other sites with URLs pointing back to your own website. You need to focus on value in what you offer, so that these sites link back to you willingly, either through their own initiative or because you offered to guest post for them and they trust you thanks to your existing content base.
Optimize Pages
Make sure that every non-text piece of content on your site is rooted in text, either through html tags, descriptions or CSS properties. This means that all your images, videos and flash animations need to be tied to text descriptions that include essential keywords for each item.
In addition, apply the same to your internal site navigation menus and systems – the buttons that let viewers explore through your site’s pages. Do not build them through the use of flash or image based applications/code. Instead, make them text based.
Both of these things are crucial because search engine bots –those pieces of code that crawl the web for new content to analyze—cannot read imagery or flash. They need to see some text or text based code in order to find things on your page and rank them.
Also, as a last tip, make sure that all of your individual page URLs are SEO friendly. Create a URL with actual words: www.myrandomsite.com/2013/03/essentials-for-seo-in-2013/.