Three Essential Elements of SEO

Art — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:12:10 +0000

You can explain the concept in a number of technical ways but SEO primarily involves optimizing one’s site to be search engine friendly. Search engines are responsible for most of the traffic on the web and can play a major role in increasing the number of visitors that come to your site. Because these visitors usually come in with a general interest, webmasters all over the world are looking for ways to increase their visibility. There are many aspects that go into SEO but these three simple elements are among the most essential.

Keywords and Phrases

The most basic and effective SEO technique of all is the use of keywords and key phrases. Keywords simply refer to the terms users commonly enter into a search engine. Search engine robots or spiders are trained to crawl the web and find these terms. Once these words are found, the corresponding web page is indexed by the spider and then listed in a search engine. For the most part, key phrases are like keywords but simply have more words bundled together. Key phrases may be presented in the form of a question or other formats commonly associated with a particular niche. When used properly, both can be the determining factor in the success of your SEO campaign.

Page Titles

If you take a look in the top of left corner of your browser, you will find text detailing the site you’re on and perhaps a brief description of what the page is about. This is the title of a web page, often overlooked but oh so important. Some webmasters don’t realize it, however, the title is one of the first elements a search engine spider will detect when landing on your site. Because of this, you want to make sure your web pages have relative, keyword-rich titles. When incorporating keywords into your titles, it is important to make sure you keep them relative and to a minimum. Search engine spiders are designed to ignore sites that contain keyword stuffed pages. This is why you want to be very careful not to overuse them.

Keyword Density

Because keyword stuffing is often looked down upon by the search engines, one must be cautious of going overboard. In fact, overusing them can actually be more damaging than using none at all when it comes to getting rankings. Keyword density is a way to make sure this doesn’t happen. This technique basically refers to the number of keywords divided by the number of words on a web page. On a page consisting of 500 words, experts suggest that anything over 5% is considered keyword stuffing while anything less is considered to make less of an impact. For this reason, you want to find out what is appropriate density for the number of words on your pages.

Conclusion

Every step helps in the race to claim search engine fame. If you think about it however, the top spots are limited and depending on the competition in your niche, earning high rankings might be next to impossible. The good thing is that the rankings change frequently so if you stay at it, you could find yourself on the front page of Google at one time or another.

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Three Essential Elements of SEO

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