How To: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics

The holy grail for any web master or website developer is to see their website on the first page of results on today's most popular search engines. With the presence of over 108 Million websites out there (Netcraft.com), with more emerging daily, it becomes increasingly difficult to make your website more distinguished than others of the same category.

I would like to go over some basic concepts and steps that are crucial to achieving the ultimate goal of climbing the ranks within search engine results. I can in no way guarantee top search engine results (as many web masters have established such a strong presence on the web, and pay large sums of money to keep their websites on top), but I can increase your chances of being included within relevant search results.

Keywords:

The heart of all search engines rely on keywords and key terms in order to associate their results with your website. Web crawlers and search engines will scan your main (index) page and all sub-pages linked from there and gather a list of the most reoccurring words, titles, headings, and links. It then attempts to create a relevant connection between those words and terms and will categorize your website.

This is a simple concept but includes the horrifying task of coming up with a list of keywords you should include on your website that is unique from your competitors. These keywords and terms should be unique but still common enough that users will often use them in a search engine to find a website like yours.

Search engines use mathematic algorithms in order to come up with the relevancy of your website to the user's desired destination, so this fact leads many web developers to load up pages with keywords and terms all over the pages. They will hide the terms so that they are the same color as the background, or will include them repeatedly out of context.

This is a big NO-NO!

Today's search engines are much "smarter" than you probably could imagine. They will see you try to trick it and will blacklist your website (which is not our goal).