Search Engine Optimization For Beginners

Information below are the most basic activity and fundamentals in SEO. You should know this concept in order to jump to the next level of SEO.


According to Wikipedia:

SEO or search engine optimization, according to wikipedia is a process of improving the volume or quality traffic to a website from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results.

For beginners, it is hard to understand how this thing works but let me explain it in not so brainy manner.

SEO actually requires some HTML knowledge; a basic HTML knowledge will be just fine. In HTML, you must know on how tags can be use and what their functions are. There are a lot of Basic HTML Tutorial websites available in the net, you just need to find the best one.

If you already have some knowledge about HTML codes and how do they work, the next thing you need to know is how search engines work. Google is the most popular search engine website among others and basically, bloggers and site administrators who are doing SEO based their performance here. When you submit a query in search engines, crawlers or spiders crawl to indexed sites and search the most relevant sites based on your query. Crawlers and spiders identify contents of a blog or site based on tags used. A paragraph tag which is <> < / p > is less important to crawlers, instead they search for important tags such as <> < /hi > which is the heading or title of a blog entry. It means that you must make a powerful title that has the right keyword usage as well as with the tags section of your entry. Basically, one of the most common SEO practices is all about usage of the right keywords. These bots also can only read text and cannot identify or read javascript, images etc. You may want to know what are the most popular keywords used by majority. You can use Google Trends or Web Tracking services such as Google Analytics, MyBlogLog etc.

Increasing your backlinks is another way of doing basic SEO. A backlink composes of your blog or site url that is posted in other websites or blogs. Doing this looks very easy but there are some guidelines you should know. Search Engines doesn’t look only on how many backlinks your site or blog have but also with the quality of those sites. To get a higher page rank, you should link with sites that have a higher page rank than yours. If your backlinks came from quality sites, search engines will identify your site as important because you gain respect with the quality backlinks that you have. Backlinks are more effective when you exchange your link to other sites or blogs that have the same niche as yours. It can also give you a targeted visitor which can increase your visitor's loyalty. You can increase your backlinks through commenting to other blogs and sites as well as using your signature in highly traffic forums that contains your blog or site url. The most common method is exchanging links with other site administrators or bloggers. You can also submit your site or blog to blog directories.

I have read some info about the relation of Google Page Connect to the increase of organic visitors from Google. When you have a lot of followers, the more Google will send you an organic visitor. I don't know yet whether it is true or not because there is no technical explanation for this matter. But you can try it out, since there are a lot of bloggers involve in follower-following exchanges.

You must also bear in mind that broken links within your blog or site can affect your performance. If the crawler find a broken link within your site, the tendency is that, it cannot fully identify your site content. You should correct script errors on your layout (I’m having hard time with this since IE 6-7 users cannot view my site because of a script error.).

And before you do this methods and techniques, make sure that your site is already indexed in Google and other search engine sites. There are free web services online that offers automatic submission of your blog or site to search engines. But some search engines restricted this kind of submission. It means that you need to manually submit your site to search engines especially in Google. Don't get fooled by web services that says they can submit your blog and site to thousands of directories for a fee. Most of those directories are thrash and not important at all.

Newbies are not recommended to purchase a domain name and a hosting site if you dont know the basic of HTML and you cant code your site without the use of WYSIWIG editor. The more your site gets older the more problems you will encounter with you site coding. so better improve yourself in coding before jumping to anything advanced. A year with managing a free domain and hosting site should be enough as an experience before purchasing domain name and hosting site.

Don't take for granted those webmaster tools because they are necessary in your SEO performance and how well you are doing.

SEO at the beginning is kinda frustrating especially when you are not seeing any developments at all. Bursting traffic cannot be achieved in just a single amount of time. It requires a lot of patience, effort and time to witness some positive results. It is your choice whether to pay for something for your SEO or just do it for free.

Goodluck!