Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - The Fundamentals

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - The Fundamentals

While surfing the web have you ever wondered why a particular site is more popular than the others? If you compare them you'll notice the content and design of both sites are equally attractive as well as interesting. The only difference is the popular site has made use of a very important tool in the digital space- 'search engine optimization'.

Its true most web masters have heard of this term and have probably already used it to get a better ranking for their websites. But the problem doesn't lie in their knowledge of WHAT search engine optimization is, it lies in their lack of knowledge on HOW to implement it effectively.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the simple process of making your website search engine friendly. With the help of key words, meta-tags, inbound links, outbound links, link baiting etc. SEO aims at:

1. Ranking your site higher in search engines

2. Consequently, bringing more traffic to your website and

3. Finally, conversion of traffic into sales and/or business

Before you start stuffing your content with keywords and excessively applying other SEO activities to your site stop...think...and plan. Formulate a strategy, identify your target audience and sensibly design the structure for your SEO campaign.

Step 1- Review and formulate

Review current statistics of your website. This will help you understand how much money you will have to invest to improve your site ranking and traffic. Figure out what your goals are for your SEO campaign and finally make sure your campaign is flexible. The elasticity of your campaign will make it easy for you to change and adapt it in the future whenever you like.

Step 2- Campaign execution

While executing your SEO campaign, make sure you do it step by step and not all at once. Even though SEO rules are pretty much the same with all search engines, what works for Google might not work for another search engine. There is no use of having a perfect plan if the execution is disorganized.

• In your content don't just shove keywords wherever you feel like, take time and place them strategically.

• Optimize your title tag. It is by far the most important step; pages with keywords in the title tag are assumed to be more relevant to the search query than other results.

• Make sure your HTML coding is precise if you want search engines to index and analyze your website effectively.

• After you have efficiently applied the above steps you can start,

- Link building

-­ Link baiting

-­ Posting inbound and outbound links

-­ Posting on forums and blogs to generate back links

Step 3- Monitor, report and adapt

Monitor your SEO campaign and check

• What you keyword rankings are?

• How much traffic it is generating for your website?

• How popular your links are?

Keep a track of all these aspects and correct them when needed. Here the flexibility of your campaign is of great importance.

If you follow these few basic steps you're bound to get the results you want and need. Most webmasters over look these simple but yet vital phases in the SEO process, don't make that mistake! Remember the key to your search engine marketing success is in the finite details of your search engine optimization campaign.

Melvin Fernandes is an Information Developer at Duchakki. He is responsible for technical documentation and content curation. His expertise lie in writing technical documentation (paper and on-line), help text and content development.