Understanding SEO ? A User?s Guide
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on 10-01-2009 at 09:44 PM (455 Views)
Search Engine optimization, SEO is a technique to improve the quality of traffic and popularity of a website. It focuses on bringing more visitors from organic search ? search engines and quality links. SEO may target a niche ? health, sports and marketing etc to attract visitors.
How SEO is accomplished ? Importance of Keywords
The mantra for a successful SEO implementation is to identify the set of keywords for a niche. To put in simple terms, Keywords are the words which are queried on the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing etc. So how do you find the most searched keywords? This has been made easy by Google. You can type a word and view the number of suggestions. This can give you a clear idea on the number of times it appears. Higher the number more searched is the keyword on the Internet. For Example, if your niche is on mobile phones some of the possible keywords would be cell phones, iPhones and Ringtones etc.
How to Optimize Your Content
By optimizing the content with the select set of keywords you can enable your website to list on the top when searched with a select set of keywords on the search engines. So should what should be the frequency of the keyword usage?
Generally, keyword density should be used 3-4%.In other words a keyword should be at least used 3-4 times per 100 words. However, you can also consider a 5% optimization if you are looking for faster indexing of content in search engines.
Are you optimizing for Visitors or Search Engines?
You should be careful while optimizing the content to get more traffic, better indexing or getting ranked higher. In a quest to obtain success with SEO you should not spam your content with keywords. No doubt they can help you accomplish your goal but your content would not make any sense to readers invariably. It might backfire and traffic might decrease.
Also never fall prey to so called black hat SEO techniques ? keyword stuffing and hiding text. All such techniques are a potential spam and they hide the keywords by setting the color of the text same as that of background or stuff too many keywords with useless content. Your site can be reported and banned.
SEO ? Other Methods
Apart from keyword based optimization you can also achieve SEO through bookmarking on social sites like Twitter, Stumbleupon and Reddit. You can share your stories and content with your social circle by bookmarking it. The bookmarking websites are search engine friendly. Hence the bookmarked pages are indexed faster. If keywords are queried for, the search engines give priority to the bookmarked content.
Backlinking is another popular SEO technique to gain page rank and get more quality traffic to your website. You can include a link of your URL while commenting on blogs. Over a period of time backlinks will help you in gaining a better page rank.
You can hire a team of professional SEO firms if you have the adequate budget. Else you can start on your own through some of the simple techniques mentioned.









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