Introduction to Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation is a technique to increase the traffic which reaches your website, improve pageranks and to gain recognition in search engines. Optimise your website, increase the visibility of your website and make your reach more targeted to get the type of visitors you want. There are various ways you can bring traffic to your site but organic search results have proven to be the most effective. A website with SEO done right has the best organic search results in all the most popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Bing. One way to optimise your site is to make sure that your website is structured correctly. This is called Off PAGE SEO. The other way is by increasing the visibility of your website through social networking sites, blogging etc, basically by making use of other websites to promote your website. This method is called ON PAGE SEO. Here are a few important SEO techniques.
Off Page SEO
There are a lot of ways in which you can promote your website to create a reputation for yourself on the online forum through Off Page SEO. Here are a few pointers:
- Social networking sites- create profiles on websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Twitter and extend the reach of your website to a much wider audience.
- Blogging- Blogging is, hands down, one of the most important SEO techniques. Blogging frequently gives your visitors a reason to visit your site again to check your updates and for search engines to crawl your site more often which in turn increases your pagerank. It couldn’t get better, seriously.
- Article submission- write articles for your site and submit them to article directories like ehow, Hubpages etc. This helps in creating more links to your website.
- Social bookmarking- how effective this way is depends totally on how effectively you use it. Submit your latest posts or blogs on social bookmarking sites. Since a lot of content is added daily to these sites, they are crawled very often by search engines. This increases your chances of readership and visibility and is a great way for website promotion.
- Submission to search engines- Submission of website to popular engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo, Bing etc. to quicken recognition is one of the more important SEO techniques.
- Submission to directories- Choose wisely the directories to submit your site to. A way which gives you delayed results, but results, nonetheless. For good SEO, make sure you’ve employed all the methods available to you in the most effective manner.
- Link baiting- This is another way of Off Page SEO. Provide links of other websites you’ve picked up content from or encourage others to do the same to increase links leading to your page. You’ve got nothing to lose.
On page SEO
On page SEO is the way to drive traffic, improve pageranks, promote your website, gain recognition by making changes to your website by making it more user friendly and encouraging crawling. Here is how you can optimise your website:
- Page title- it is very important for all your pages to have good page titles focusing on the keyword of the page
- Meta tags- this provides the meta information of your page. Use the meta description tag wisely, include your focus keywords and be as precise as possible.
- Headings- to increase readership of your content, divide your piece into paragraphs and give them headings for which H1, H2, H3 or H4 tags are used.
- Keyword- chose the correct focus keyword and maintain it’s density throughout your content. Ensure that the words are not used in close proximity to each other and maintain their prominence. This is possibly the most important On Page SEO method.
- Internal links- you can either place links on your website in your content or provide permanent navigation links and make it easier or visitors to navigate your site.
- Structured URLs- use shorter URLs and include your keywords.
Why you need search engine optimisation
While there are a lot of ways to bring traffic to your site, organic search results on popular search engines provide the best results. This is because they make your website visible to people who come searching on the internet for information you provide. This is the safest way for you to get the kind of visitors you want. Though search engines can pick up and crawl sites on their own, this might take time. To make it a faster process, you need to apply SEO and help these engines recognise your platform and provide you with traffic. Well done SEO can be the difference between a very popular organisation receiving a lot of traffic every day and an organisation struggling for views. You can learn Search Engine Optimisation yourself too or leave it in the hands of a professional who can optimise your website by bringing a highly specialised perspective to it.