SEO Basics for Webmasters

Optimizing your site for search engines can be a lot of work, but it’s definitely worth it. This article can help you understand and apply the basics of SEO for your website. Good SEO should be an important part of everyone’s online strategy. Search engine spiders, also known as bots or web crawlers, don’t spend much time on your site. The crawlers of today sift through your content, ignoring most of the HTML and CSS elements on the pages.

To start, it’s a good idea to keep your text away from the bottom of the page. Google only indexes 1/3 of all the pages it visits, so if you have all your content on the bottom of the page it might get skipped. There are literally endless possibilities to how you choose to optimize your site. While there is more than one way to skin a cat, there are some basic rules that everyone can follow for best SEO practices. Following are just a few key concepts for best SEO practices.

Content is Key

Search engine crawlers don’t care about elaborate styles or images that you’ve placed on your pages. They are mainly concerned with looking at the content of your site. This means all the text. Headings, subheadings, paragraphs, alt image names and video transcriptions all count as text. The latest search engine crawlers from Google now rank responsive web pages higher, so you should focus on design to a degree. But remember, content is a big part of getting noticed and ranked on search engines.

Create Original Content

Creating interesting, useful content will go a long way for your site. Posting duplicate content, plagiarizing or spinning articles can mean harsh penalties from web crawlers. Mostly those “penalties” include a lower ranking.

Publish Authoritative Content

In order to gain your visitors trust and build authority, you will need to blog often. Try to post fresh relevant content to your website as often as possible. Daily blogging is a good idea for any site. If you can’t blog often, consider hiring someone else to help you. The following tips can help you become a legitimate source of content and increase your search engine ranking.

Invoke Action – No matter what kind of content you publish, make sure there are calls to action. How to’s and life cheats are very popular because they are engaging and useful.

Be an Authority – It’s important to write or hire a writer who knows the subject matter. This way you can provide better content and answers to your visitors.

Provide Accurate Information – To become an authority, you should provide accurate information on a regular basis and site reputable sources. Interviews, reputable websites, books and firsthand experience are all great ways to find information.

Linking – Carefully consider which sites you link to. You should only link to sites you trust. If you have links that lead to questionable sites, it reflects poorly on your reputation.

Keep the Code Clean

Web spiders will search through the backend of your site to browse the content. These bots DO NOT like poorly organized code. Try and keep CSS files and templates as clean as you can. Use external CSS and JavaScript files since the web crawlers aren’t concerned with them anyways.

Remember that SEO is not rocket science. That doesn’t mean it’s easy either. To make your site visible to search engines you have to be diligent and balance a lot of different things. The previous tips are just the beginning when it comes to SEO. Hopefully we peaked your interest and you can begin implementing a winning SEO strategy. Check out more of our articles on managing your SEO.