SEO 101 - The Bare Bones Basics of Search Engines and SEO

In an increasingly global Internet community, many techniques (good and bad) have surfaced to help aggressive websites grab as much market share in their respective industries as possible.  It makes perfect sense considering the Internet is used by a wide variety of people from all over the world and each in their own way is a potential customer.

In the beginning, finding content relevant to one’s search was simple because only a few websites were up and running online. These days however, the Internet is a massive junkyard of content in all shapes and sizes, with people of various age groups, backgrounds, and geographic locations generating their own online publications and content. Therefore, Internet users rely heavily on various tools known as search engines to simplify their web searches and make the whole process manageable.

What are search engines?

Search engines are online interfaces used to search for relevant content on the Internet based on the keywords the user enters into the system. As a business, you must find a way to be prioritized among hundreds and thousands of businesses that offer similar or content and get yourself to the top (or at least close to the top).

This is where Search Engine Optimization or SEO comes into play.

Search Engine Optimization is a method used to give a particular website and its content better ranking in a search engine’s query response listings. It usually tries to give websites an edge over others, particularly in those organic or crawler search engines.

Unlike Pay Per Click search engine rankings like Google Adsense and Yahoo Search Marketing, organic searches are those listings yielded without payment. Your website is found and rated by crawler search engines that simulate the act of crawling through the web and following links to find the best content for the searcher.

White Hat SEO vs. Black Hat SEO

Although the principle sounds simple enough, SEO has come under attack of misuse by people who try to take advantage of it. This is the reason why today, SEO is categorized into “white hat SEO”, otherwise known as SEO that uses legitimate ways to build search engine ranking, and “black hat SEO”, which is used to manipulate search engine listings with unethical methods.

While “black hat SEO” makes use of unethical methods to manipulate listings and deceive others, “white hat SEO” focuses on honest methods of improving a website and its content in order to promote it on the Internet much better.

Isn't Pay Per Click Easier?

With pay-per-click advertising you pay for every visitor to your website. This can ride up costs and become the opposite of profitable if you don't know what you are doing.

Organic search listings, however, display websites regardless of whether or not they are paid, and who wouldn't want to be at the top of the search engines without paying for it?

So how do you optimize a website for high rankings?

If you want to SEO your website for the organic search listings you want to concentrate on four things; Meta tags, high quality content, relevant keywords and links from other websites.

The first thing you want to do is go through your website and make sure each page you build has meta tags and a meta description describing what that page is all about. Although this isn't as important as it used to be it still makes a difference.

The second thing you want to do it is make sure you are using relevant keywords on your website. As you put down your copy make sure you pick a few solid keywords that relate to your industry and product and use them repeatedly throughout the writing process.

Third, you want to create beefed up content written in order to provide information and maximum satisfaction to visitors. Search engines take into account the "satisfaction" of visitors on the basis of relevance of content and even the frequency of visits.  This is why you won't get indexed if you just repeat keywords over and over again but your copy doesn't make any sense.

The last thing you want to do is focus on getting other websites in your industry to link back to you. The more links you have from respected websites the more search engines are going to look your way.

At the end of the day, you can buy into all the SEO gimmicks online or you can start focusing on what works. Relevant Meta tags, targeted keywords, links and quality content are the four keys to getting your website found via the organic search engines in the near future.