Search engine optimization or SEO has been the buzz-word among web developers for the past few years and it deserves to be so. How you optimize your website for the search engines directly relates to how much traffic you will get and if you’re trying to make money out of your website, then more traffic means more money as well.
The bad thing is that I’ve seen many websites that are not optimized for the search engines in any way. Worst, the designers / developers of this websites think that they will magically appear in the search engines after they uploaded their website. On the good side, SEO is not that difficult at all. In fact, search engine optimization is so easy that it becomes second nature to a web developer / designer in a very short amount of time.
In this 10-part series, we will be focusing more on keywords and website popularity since SEO mostly revolves on that but before we continue, here’s a short and basic list of DON’Ts for you to follow:
- Do not use frames
- Do not use iframes
- Do not use hidden text
- Do not spam the forums
- Do not cheat the search engines in any way imaginable
Remember, there is no easy way to get the #1 spot on the search engines for your targetted keyword but it’s not that difficult either. It’s all a matter of doing the right thing and that’s what we are going to discuss.
The Keywords
Put simply, keywords are the words that people type in a search engine’s search box in order for them to find a particular website that satisfies what they are looking for. Here’s how it works… When a person types a word or a set of words in a search engine, the search engine would automatically search it’s database for relevant websites that match the keyword/s being searched. Each search engine has its own algorithm that basically adds ’scores’ to a website based on the keywords being searched. It then sorts the websites based on their scores and shows the results to the person doing the searching.
If all of that sounds like rocket science to you, don’t worry. You actually don’t need to know all of that to get a good position in the search engine. What you need to know are what the search engines want and good thing, they are pretty transparent in divulging some of their secrets.
Ok, enough of the intro. Let’s move on to Step 1…
STEP 1: Know your Keywords
You need to have a goal and for the sake of SEO, your goal is to rank well for a particular keyword. Let’s say you’re name is George Lindemann and you are advocating for something called “People For the American Way” also known as PFAW. With this in mind, you may want to rank well for the keyphrase George Lindemann pfaw. You may also want to optimize for George Lindemann People For the American Way as your secondary keyphrase.
Now that you know what you want, you may now start to actually optimize your website. This brings us to Step 2 - Keyword Research.
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