It took me quite a while to really wrap my head around what SEO was and how important it really is. While I knew some things, it is true that a little knowledge can be dangerous, wouldn't you say? Not fully delving into search engine optimization and educating myself wasted me a lot of time and a lot of money over the years. I never thought that it could make much difference and I thought that I knew everything that I needed to know but I knew so little that I didn't even know what I didn't know!
Simply put, SEO is just a way to get search engines to recognize your content and help people to find your website. Some of the methods are pretty simple and some are more complex and some are just theories of mind that are not yet proven yet make sense to me logically. But that is another story for another day.
If you think of your website as a box that is identical to every other box or website on the internet, you might be able to understand what I'm talking about. Just think of your box being blank on the outside. No writing on it whatsoever. Nobody knows what's inside of it and without a way to tell people what you're website is about it will just look like an unattractive blank cardboard box just sitting there attracting no attention from the public. What we want to do is write on the outside of the box what your website is about in the most appealing way possible when we're doing SEO work on your site. This will let everyone know, including search engines, what's inside.
There are actually to different kinds of SEO. One concerns what you do with your website and what is on the outside of that box. This is called on page search engine optimization. Different things we do with a site include header tags that we use, titles of the pages and even the name of the website is very important in your success in ranking a website well when it comes to a certain topic. How many times a certain word is included in your site also plays a key role also.
There are books written on the subject and there are numerous theories on what different aspects of on page SEO are the most important but the truth is that nobody knows for sure and the rules are changing all the time. You see, people are always looking for an easy way to make a buck and some try to game the system to get their site ranked better for any given keyword. This causes the search engines to constantly change the rules, sometimes even multiple times a week and even daily at times.
There are also factors external to your website that play a role in how well or poorly your site ranks in the search engine results for any given search term. This is often referred to as off page or off site SEO. The methods used to help your website include social bookmarking, article marketing and other methods that allow you to put a little advertisement of sorts on another website. These all act as little signs pointing back to your website and act as votes in an internet popularity contest with the search engines being the judge.
Again, once upon a time it was possible to game the system and trick people and search engines into believing that your site held some sort of special authority over others concerning a certain topic but without good content and natural appearing SEO, you can actually do damage to your reputation. It would be like hanging a sign that said "free beer" pointing to your website and then not have any beer at your place. You wind up with a bunch of angry people and perhaps a black eye for your trouble.
These days, SEO or search engine optimization still includes all the same signals and signs that it always has and some. Things like link velocity and freshness factors come into play thus making it more difficult to game the system falsely, while rewarding those who practice SEO by following the rules and providing good information for those looking for it.
Simply put, SEO is just a way to get search engines to recognize your content and help people to find your website. Some of the methods are pretty simple and some are more complex and some are just theories of mind that are not yet proven yet make sense to me logically. But that is another story for another day.
If you think of your website as a box that is identical to every other box or website on the internet, you might be able to understand what I'm talking about. Just think of your box being blank on the outside. No writing on it whatsoever. Nobody knows what's inside of it and without a way to tell people what you're website is about it will just look like an unattractive blank cardboard box just sitting there attracting no attention from the public. What we want to do is write on the outside of the box what your website is about in the most appealing way possible when we're doing SEO work on your site. This will let everyone know, including search engines, what's inside.
There are actually to different kinds of SEO. One concerns what you do with your website and what is on the outside of that box. This is called on page search engine optimization. Different things we do with a site include header tags that we use, titles of the pages and even the name of the website is very important in your success in ranking a website well when it comes to a certain topic. How many times a certain word is included in your site also plays a key role also.
There are books written on the subject and there are numerous theories on what different aspects of on page SEO are the most important but the truth is that nobody knows for sure and the rules are changing all the time. You see, people are always looking for an easy way to make a buck and some try to game the system to get their site ranked better for any given keyword. This causes the search engines to constantly change the rules, sometimes even multiple times a week and even daily at times.
There are also factors external to your website that play a role in how well or poorly your site ranks in the search engine results for any given search term. This is often referred to as off page or off site SEO. The methods used to help your website include social bookmarking, article marketing and other methods that allow you to put a little advertisement of sorts on another website. These all act as little signs pointing back to your website and act as votes in an internet popularity contest with the search engines being the judge.
Again, once upon a time it was possible to game the system and trick people and search engines into believing that your site held some sort of special authority over others concerning a certain topic but without good content and natural appearing SEO, you can actually do damage to your reputation. It would be like hanging a sign that said "free beer" pointing to your website and then not have any beer at your place. You wind up with a bunch of angry people and perhaps a black eye for your trouble.
These days, SEO or search engine optimization still includes all the same signals and signs that it always has and some. Things like link velocity and freshness factors come into play thus making it more difficult to game the system falsely, while rewarding those who practice SEO by following the rules and providing good information for those looking for it.
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