SEO, or How to Earn Search Engines’s Respect to Your Website or Blog
ABC of SEO
You must have heard of something called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Why do websites need to be optimized for search engines and what these search engines are?
Simply saying, search engines are the websites like Google, Bing, Yandex. They are specially developed to help users find the relevant information basing on their search queries. Suppose you are searching for unusual news. So you will open one of search engine websites and enter in the search bar “unusual news”. The search engine will show you a list of results. On the first place you will see the website which is most relevant to your search query according to the search engine. Slowly we have approached to the essence of SEO.
Search Engine optimization is basically the making of a website easily understandable and trustworthy for search engines. The more the website is understood by a search engine, the more the information on the website is trustworthy for a search engine, the more chances your website gets that a search engine will respect it and push up to the topper positions in search results.
What is SEO?
SEO is complex measures that make your site clear for search engines and users.
SEO is the first and an integral step of promotoion.
SEO is to make a website of high quality and, therefore, to put it in demand among the audiences.
SEO is a strategy and tactics that brings more audience to your website.
SEO is making your website the best among others of similar content.
SEO is the necessary fundamental on which a high-quality website is built and developed.
If content is the soul and body of a website, SEO is its sound health and self-respect. It makes a website beautiful externally and internally. SEO is the success of your business.
Successful SEO
SEO involves all the sides of a website modification:
1. its physical appearance (inside and outside), and
2. its significance and popularity in the World Wide Web.
Physical Appearance (Offline SEO)
Outside
Successful website has a user-friendly interface. It means the moment users occur on your website, they should quickly understand the navigation: what, where and how they can find.
Colour scheme is important. Too bright colours may negatively influence users’s eyes. It can be difficult to read. Eyes can start pain and users will not to return to your website or blog again.
Blocks with content should be neatly organized. Don’t forget to leave free spaces, the so called “air”. Website also needs to breathe.
IMPORTANT!!! Your website name should be easy to remember and have easy spelling. Short names are in preference.
Devote a good deal of time to your content. If you are writing, try to avoid spelling and punctuation mistakes. If you are posting photos or images, they should be of a good quality adapted for web. However very heavy images may slow down the loading of your website. And nowadays users do not like waiting.
Make your URLs comprehensive. They should reflect the content of the page. Short and catchy links are easy to remember for users, so later they can come back directly entering the URL in their browser.
Use traditional icons. If you have an online store, people are already used to a “cart” icon to see their selected items. Do not try to express your creativity here. It will only complicate a user’s experience on your web-store.
Use headlines with the tag <H1> and use the tag <H2> for subheadings.
Regularly update your website so the search engine robot knows that your website is still alive and there is need to visit it and index pages. The more updates you make and the more these updates are of current issues popular among the audience, the more often the search engine robot will visit and index your website. With often and many updates, it can finally decide to “live” on your website. Having such a guest is a big SEO successs
Inside
You may have read about meta tags such as title, description, and keywords. Some sources point out that nowadays search engines do not take in account these meta tags. It is only half-true. Title, description and keywords do contribute to successful SEO. Thus, take time and put these meta tags in the code of your website before the closing tag </head>.
Keep in mind, all images should have <alt> tag. It is alternative text which is shown if media file display is turned off. Also remember to fill the <description> tag of an image.
Create a sitemap.xls and a robot.txt. Put both files in the root folder of your website. It will simplify the work of a search engine robot to wander on your website and collect its content for further showing it in the search results. With robot.txt you can allow or disallow the robot to access particular folders, sections or pages of your website.
Significance and Popularity on World Wide Web (Online SEO)
Make the Internet aware of your website. Tell your friends and colleagues about it. The most efficient way is to publish links on social networking websites such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, VK, Odnoklassniki and others.
Publish backlinks of your website on relevant pages of other websites. For instance, if you are writing a blog about cinema, your backlink may appear on a website of any cinema house, or a film critics page. It will then be recognized by a search engine as more trustworthy due to the fact that it is placed on the page with a similar content.
SEO is a very wide topic to discuss. Here we have slightly touched just a tip of it. A lot of websites offer their SEO services promising top places in search results. Some play on the ignorance of people and demand unreasonably high prices for such services. Thus, one should have at least a basic knowledge for what he/she is paying.
Recommended to study:
Search Engine Optimization. Starter Guide by Google (click to download)
Bricks of successful SEO by SearchEngineLand (click to download)