Webmasters use SEO to enhance a site with search engine friendly techniques. This allows a website to get more traffic from the search engines which in turn increases its potential for business. These techniques are generally focused on making it easier for the search engines to index your site and rank it high. You can do this by optimizing a site for search engines or you can hire an SEO firm to do it for you.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to SEO, but there are some general guidelines that you should follow. In addition to these basic guidelines, you also need to take into consideration the type of website you have. There are many factors that affect how well your site will perform in the search engines. The following paragraphs describe some of the most important ones:
Keyword density
As mentioned before, SEO involves getting your site ranked high among the search engines. How does this happen? Well, the way it works is that the search engines look at how often keywords appear within a page. They are looking for specific words and phrases that best describe what your site's content is about. If you put "dog" in your website's title tag 10 times and "cat" only once, you would be considered low in the search results. On the other hand if you had both terms in your title tags 10 times each, then you would be considered higher in the search rankings. The same goes for your body text; you want to make sure that the keyword phrase appears as much as possible without overdoing it, because the search engines don't like websites that are too spammy.
Page titles
Your page's title tag is a very important factor when it comes to search engine optimization. It needs to contain the keywords you're trying to rank for but, even more importantly, it needs to attract users' attention and give them something to click on. A good example of a page title is: "Dog Training Classes in New York City". Now, let's say you were selling dog training classes for dogs. Your URL might look like this: http://www.yourwebsite.com/dog-training-classes-in-new-york-city. You may also want to check out our article on how to write great page titles.
Meta descriptions
A meta description is a short piece of information that appears below the actual page title in the search results. This is where you tell users exactly why they should visit your site so that they know what to expect when they arrive. You want to make sure that the description is compelling enough to draw people's attention and encourage them to click through to your site. Here's an example of what a meta description might look like: "Get your dog trained quickly and easily." Make sure that the length of the meta description doesn't exceed 160 characters!
Internal linking structure
The internal linking structure is another important part of SEO. When you link to other pages on your own site, you help the search engines find those pages faster. The way to do this is to strategically place links throughout your site. This helps Google understand what your site is all about and therefore, rank it higher in the search results. The rule of thumb here is to create internal links whenever you can. For instance, if you have a blog post about the top five ways to train your dog, you could embed a link to the next post in the series in the first paragraph of the current one. Then, you could link to the third post in the series in the second paragraph of the first post. Keep going until you've linked to every single post in the series (assuming there are 5 posts).
Content architecture
When it comes to content, you need to think about what kind of content is appropriate for your site. Do the users really need a detailed description of the various types of dog breeds? Probably not. On the other hand, users might want details on what kinds of dog foods are available in their local stores. To decide what to include, it's helpful to consider who is visiting your site. Are they searching for certain products, services or just general information? If they are looking for general information, then you probably wouldn't want to include detailed product descriptions or service offerings. However, if they're looking for products or services, you need to provide detailed descriptions and images to make it easy for them to see what they're looking for.
Site speed
One of the biggest problems with today's Internet is slow load speeds. If your site takes forever to load, people won't bother reading it. So, you need to ensure that your site loads fast. The fastest way to do this is to use caching software. Caching software makes a copy of your site files while leaving the original untouched. Whenever someone tries to read a web page that hasn't been cached yet, the cache server sends the file from its storage space directly to the user's computer. As soon as the user has finished viewing the page, the cache server saves it back to its storage space so that the next visitor will also receive it. That means that your site's visitors don't need to wait around for the page to load - they immediately start reading the next page.
Conclusion
SEO is certainly not simple, but anyone willing to learn the basics can do it. Just keep in mind that you'll need to devote time to learning everything you need to know in order to get the best results. Also remember that SEO requires patience and persistence. While you might get lucky and instantly rise up to the top of the search results, it usually takes time. But patience and hard work always pay off...