What is search engine optimization(SEO)?

The video below is a good starter video to help you understand the basics of SEO.

The basics of search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is creating content and optimizing it on your site, including layout and graphics, to give you the edge when visitors are looking for topics your site covers. Creating a solid SEO foundation is one of the most important factors to gaining organic traffic, however it’s often one of the most overlooked aspects when creating both a website and the content that fills in.

Regardless of what your site is about, promoting, trying to sell or just the message it’s trying to convey, the core of your content must be written with proper grammar and in a readable, digestible way. Additionally, specific groups of words that make up sentence structure are equally important, as that’s how potential visitors can find your site; rarely does a searcher look for only one word on a search.

Robots, or as they are more commonly known, bots, are what search engines deploy to crawl websites and help index your contents and place importance on them. By misspelling words or writing in a way that is hard to digest for the reader, these advanced bots can prevent your site from gaining the traffic it needs to survive and thrive.

Content also needs to be written with a website viewer in mind. Most content on a single page of any given website in any demographic or niche is under 1,000 words, in fact most of it is closer to 400 words per page. This is so the reader can easily comprehend the contents, yet the article doesn’t at first appear too long to read in one sitting. Ironically, many people don’t read books as often as they may want because of the time investment in finishing one, but if they were written into smaller chapters the way websites are broken down into pages or blog postings, we’d all probably read more, more often.

When a visitor gets to your site they aren’t looking for content that is stuffed with keywords that you used to enhance your search engine results. Don’t make the mistake of others by creating content that will only appeal to search engines. Remember, your goal is to attract visitors, once you get them to your site you don’t want to provide them with junk content.

Adding relevant images and photos to your content also helps convey the story or enhance the article; they help to visually break up the text and allow the readers eye to scan. Likewise, the use of bullet points or creating subtitles in bold will break up the monotony of plain text. From an SEO standpoint, always utilize the tags within photos and images to add titles, descriptions and captions, these keywords are also read by search engine bots.

It’s important to the success of your site and business that it be easily found and high ranking in search engines, but you also want the content within to read well and be informative or your SEO work won’t result in any turnover or profits.

Other good sites for SEO noobs to check out:

SEOMoz – A leader in the SEO market. They do a lot of good research and SEO tests. Read their blog, watch their videos, learn SEO.

WickedFire – A lot of serious internet marketers go here, if you’re easily offended then you may want to stay away form this one because they will call you out for being a noob. You may want to just read for a week or two before actually signing up to get a feel for the community.

DP – Probably the largest webmaster/internet marketing forum on the internet. A lot of 3rd world users go here so the discussion is somewhat low quality.

SitePoint – A large webmaster forum, nothing special but I’d reccomend this over DP.

Matt Cutts – This is the official face for Google when it comes to the SEO world. Listen to what he has to say but don’t take everything he says at face value because he has been known to fudge the truth from time to time when it’s in the best interest of Google. I know right, hard to believe.

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