Search engine optimization, commonly abbreviated as SEO, is a practice used by webmasters to optimize their website for the highest attainable search engine ranking. A webmaster employs several methods to achieve this end. Through organic placement of a website amongst the first search results, webmasters draw a higher volume of traffic, which is especially important when using their web presence for marketing purposes.
In addition to search engine optimization, SEO can also stand for search engine optimizers, that is, those who practice search engine optimization. These SEOs use various techniques to achieve high organic placement in the search engine rankings. Accurate, descriptive title tags and meta tags can be sampled by search engines and displayed in the search engine rankings to provide useful information about the website to viewers of those search engine rankings. SEOs also use descriptive URLs, rather than strings of numbers or unhelpful words like “folder” or “index”, to avoid intimidating and confusing viewers, and to help achieve high organic placement in the search engine rankings.
Links to a site are important in determining that site’s organic placement in search engine rankings, though it is not always within the purview of SEOs to determine the number and quality of those links. Nevertheless, they are what determines a site’s popularity. Search engine algorithms examine any website which links to another, checking it for keyword density, quality content, organic placement of links within text, basically judging the quality of the site in order to determine the quality of the link. If the site is a trusted source, and the link is genuine, that will aid in search engine optimization. SEOs value these kinds of incoming links, because they help provide a higher search engine ranking.
The text of a website, its actual content, can be made more valuable to SEOs for search engine optimization through keyword density. The keywords a person enters into a search engine determines the results they get. Search engines examine a website for context, thus preventing an unethical SEO from utilizing keyword density of phrases that have nothing to do with the purpose of the site. However, when used properly, keyword density, that is, the organic placement of keywords within the text, can help SEOs grab the attention of search engines, and improve their standing with the search engine rankings.
Keyword density usually focuses on phrases that are short, relevant, and likely to be entered by users into a search engine. An SEO can use keyword density to determine their anchor links within a certain piece of text, using keywords to link from one page in the site to another.
Keyword density is not the only important metric used to determine search engine rankings for specific queries. Obviously the keywords have to make sense in context, or else keyword density as a concept is useless, and will be treated as such by the search engine ranking algorithms. But moreover, the search engines use semantics to determine the meaning of a query entered by a user. For example, an SEO may focus on keyword density of the phrase “online gambling”, but the search engine may still display the SEO’s site as a result if a user enters the query “online casino”, even if the phrase is never used within the website’s text.
Before using keyword density to aid in search engine optimization, SEOs have to know what keywords to use. There are analytics tools that SEOs use to determine likely queries that are related to their most relevant keywords, and show how often these queries are entered into search engines. The more broad a search term is, the more results there will be, and it is very difficult for even the most determined SEOs to place highly in those search engine rankings. More narrowly focused search terms, however, can produce more specific results, and it is these that SEOs use when seeking keyword density. Focused, relevant keyword density can aid SEOs in search engine optimization, resulting in high organic placement even in competitive search engine rankings.
Especially important for merchant websites, keyword density that focuses on more specific content will result in higher conversion rates. If an SEO attracts traffic that already knows what they’re searching for and what they’re interested in, then that traffic is likely to be more valuable, resulting in more sales per visitor. That’s the kind of search engine optimization that SEOs strive to develop, the kind which gives them high organic placement amongst very specific search results. If, on the other hand, an SEO’s search engine optimization efforts developing good keyword density and quality links gives their site high organic placement amongst search engine rankings that aren’t relevant to the user’s query, then the SEO’s search engine optimization efforts are essentially wasted.
SEOs sometimes work around search engine optimization altogether by simply using the search engine’s advertising program to bid on certain keywords so that their website displays as an advertisement when users make the specified queries. Since this is a marketing strategy, and not an SEO strategy, it does not result in organic placement in the search engine rankings. Even when the site appears on the first page of search engine rankings, it is specified as a sponsored result. Still, it is a perfectly legitimate marketing strategy that SEOs and webmasters can use to increase traffic wherever search engine optimization itself stops short.
An SEO has several principal search engine optimization goals. Making the website accessible to viewers also makes it more accessible to search engines. A well designed site with working links and searchable text which loads quickly can be easily cached by the search engines, resulting in high organic placement. Having a sitemap helps search engines crawl larger sites, and avoiding duplicate content means more pages will be indexed and displayed, resulting in a higher overall organic placement. Encouraging a community of users can lead to numerous quality incoming links. An SEO who helps a webmaster develop a usable, functional, professionally designed site full of quality content can achieve high organic placement in search engine rankings, and that is what search engine optimization is all about.
Tags: Keywords, Organic Listing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO