Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimization’
Search Engine Optimization Simplified
For those who have heard SEO but do not know what it means, it’s an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It means optimizing your site for greater chances on appearing on Search Engine Result Page (SeRP). This is the primary goal of every website owners. It may sound simple but definitely requires attention and dedication to make it work in your advantage. It can either improve or damage reputation of a websites’ performance. It’s an Internet Marketing strategy that analyzes how Search Engine work and how people behave.
There are two types of SEO, on-page and off-page optimization. The on-page optimization is improving the elements within your site. This includes:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Title that you would like to appear on SeRP</TITLE>
<META CONTENT=”description of the content”>
<META CONTENT=”keywords separated by comma “>
</HEAD>
- Content – content should written based on relevant keywords.
- Title Tags –appears on the top portion of the code of your page.
- Meta Tags –not required though it allows detailed description of your site. The most commonly abused tag is the keyword meta-tag. Google in fact recently mentioned that they do not use keyword to rank in web search result, other Search Engine still does. People have used it to spam search engines. However, meta-description is still used as snippet in SeRP for Google.
- Title and Alt Attributes – describes text links and images.
- Internal Linking – linking within the site
- URL Structure
Off-page optimization is on the other hand is any method done off-page to maximize performance, such as:
- Link Development – backlinking, link exchange etc.
- Article Marketing – article distribution
- Social Media Marketing (SMM) – Facebook, Twitter etc.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – paid listing
- Pay Per Click (PPC Campaign) – AdWords etc.
There are numerous techniques to optimize site off-page, the above mentioned are just list of commonly used strategies. Both methods complement each other.
Although different SEO expert has their own opinion which is better used to optimize websites. In my opinion, no matter how optimize the pages of your site is, without proper and continuous off-page optimization effort your SEO campaign may not be as successful as you thought it would be.
Additionally, you may implement both but still you will wonder why your site does not appear on the first page of SeRP, don’t be frustrated, there are more factors to consider including the number of years you have been in the web. There is no road map to follow in SEO - not because everybody is doing it, you should as well. One example is your Twitter and Facebook account, it’s one that is mostly talked about, everybody is doing but there are many things to consider before jumping in to Social Media Marketing.
Before doing anything always remember that every move you make could either break or make the best out of your business. SEO may be simplified in layman’s term but it’s not for everybody to chew. Experimenting on techniques and keeping up to date with the current trend is one of the factor behind SEO success.
Google PageRank, How Important it is?
Site owners have been focusing on PageRank which should not be the case. There are many other metrics that could be use including conversion rates and ROI. Google have in fact removed it from the data in the Webmasters’ tool. It’s not as important as it is, they only update Google Ranking a few times a year as indicated in the Google Webmaster Help thread:
“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. 
” – Susan Moskwa, Google Employee
All this time site owners and webmasters have been having the wrong notion that the higher the PageRank is the more important your site is. It’s a good thing that this has been removed. This could stop people from focusing too much on PageRank and more on the relevancy of the content. Though admittedly, we could not change the perception of the people overnight.
There is far more important Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to choose from to say how well your site is performing. Like for example, conversion rate, perhaps you have a huge traffic to your site but are these converted to sales? Or are these Visitors your target market. Site owners and web masters could use Analytics to monitor website performance using different metrics. In fact, it was also stated in Google Webmaster Central FAQ Crawling, Indexing and Ranking as follows:
Q: My site’s PageRank has gone up / gone down / not changed in months!
A: Don’t worry. In fact, don’t bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner. If you’re looking for metrics, we’d encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.
Which are you going to use as a metric really depends on what is important to your business. In the end you should always measure you’re success in terms of optimizing your site by comparing your website performance vis-à-vis operational performance – end result.