Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics – 5 Steps to a Higher Ranking

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a very rewarding when successful but one must keep in mind it is a long term effort. Success requires time and effort while following a consistent and well tested program. For this article, we will be referencing Google a lot for the simple reason they account for over 70% of all web searches. The concepts going forward work with any search engine.

To begin lets quickly go over why Google and other search engine do what they do. First off they are all businesses; that is, they exist to make money. Advertising is the life blood of all search engines and to be successful they must accomplish two things. First, Google must provide the end user a rich and rewarding experience by delivering relevance for their searches. What relevance means is Google wants a user to find what they are looking for. Secondly, to get companies to advertise with them Google must provide quality customers to they advertises via ads. Content providers and websites that help Google achieve these two goals are rewarded handsomely.

So what makes a web site relevant?

Search Engines want to know which site is relevant for a particular concept. These concepts are represented by phrases or key words. Example: single family homes, luxury resorts, organic food store.

Possessing massive computing power, the search engines read all these pages and ranks the sites based on a set of rules. When you go on a search engine and type a key phrase, the search engine picks the best matches by looking at the following hierarchy:

1. Authority…How many links from their sites about the subject. The more links to your site, the more authority
2. When the key word is the main focus of each site. They determine this by your sites structure
3. Which pages on the sites are most dedicated to the key works
4. Where those pages are more relevant an all the other pages in the search engines index.

No search engine releases it’s exact criteria, much less search algorithm, but we have found the following factors are what matter’s in obtaining a high search ranking.

Title Tags – Tags on the top of the hierarchy page. They are the first thing search engines look at.

Description Meta Tag- Affects your rankings and some search engine show this a snippet in your search

Headings (h1, h2, h3, etc) – Headings provide a content outline to the search engines when they crawl. If your heading contains the key word, that shows relevance.

Paragraph Copy – The more one writes, the easier it is to obtain a ranking. Don’t stuff keywords though. Including your key words in the copy multiple times will actually hurt your rankings.