You’ve got your web hosting package chosen, your website set up, and your WordPress system installed. That’s it, right? Wrong! Although the famous saying goes, “If you build it, they will come,” it’s not always true, and certainly not when it comes to your website.
You want people to find your website. For that, you need SEO, or search engine optimization. Ask most any web hosting professional, and he or she will tell you that SEO is vital to the success of your website. But what is it?
Simply put, it’s designing your website so that search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing will find and crawl your website, placing your links as close to the top as possible, ahead of those other guys’ websites.
Why is SEO important?
We’ve established that SEO is important, but why? Here are a few key points to consider:
- With proper SEO, your website’s links will be more likely to show up when visitors search relevant keywords through search engines.
- With SEO. you will choose keywords that are relevant to your article or post, and that will come up in the searches that visitors initiate.
- When you have decent SEO, your website will receive more visitors, which means more pageviews, and the possibility of higher advertising revenues, if you use services such as Google AdWords, Commission Junction, or other services that offer advertising services to web publishers
How does one ensure proper SEO?
The most important thing to remember with SEO is that it can be a blessing and a curse. What this means is that as long as you’re using keywords honestly and ethically, you’ll reap the rewards of an optimized website.
If you engage in unethical practices such as “Google bombing,” or intentionally placing keywords that have nothing to do with the article into the SEO code in an attempt to drive people in no matter the cost, you could actually find your site’s results lowered or even removed altogether. The Internet community tends to frown upon webmasters who, for example, put generic keywords such as “Justin Bieber” into an article about iPhones.
In order to ensure that you are properly optimizing your website, you’ll want to carefully select the keywords that you use, which would ideally be placed into the article itself. Make sure that the keywords are relevant. So, if you’re writing an article about an iPhone, you’d use keywords such as “Apple’s iPhone device,” or “the iPhone 5S.”
By choosing these keywords, you will not only be using keywords for what you are actually discussing, but you’ll be more likely to use the exact keywords people are using, which in turn will drive them to your website. For more advice on choosing concise, relevant keywords, consult primers such as this one.
The article to which we just linked was found by using the keywords “choosing decent SEO keywords.” That article’s webmaster chose relevant keywords which allowed the article to appear near the top of the search results. And that’s the sort of result that you’ll want.
One important thing to remember about keywords is that what works for one website may not work for another, so you’ll need to take time to tweak and adjust your keywords, consulting your web statistics (such as the free StatCounter. which allows you to see detailed results for keywords) to see what brings the best results for you. In other words, don’t be discouraged if your first article doesn’t bring the traffic you want. However, with time and practice, you’ll soon find yourself a skilled SEO wordsmith.
Make sure to be descriptive
If you use a content management system such as WordPress, there are countless plugins which will code your pages for the best SEO results. Even so, you’ll still need to provide certain data such as a meta description. As the name suggests, it’s a brief summary of what the page or article is about. For best results, you’ll want to limit the description to 150-160 characters.
The description is important because it is often used in snippets that describe the website in search engine results. This will be a great opportunity to grab visitors, so make sure the description is clear, to the point and relevant. If your article breaks a major news story, use keywords relevant to that, so that visitors will find your website quickly.
Another thing to point out here is that descriptions should be unique, so one size does not fit all. Each page or post will need its own description if you wish to achieve maximum results in the search engine, and if you want to drive relevant traffic to your website.
Along with the meta description are meta keywords. Both of these items go into the meta tags of each page or post, and appear in the “head” portion of the HTML code. The meta keywords are separate from the keywords you would place into your article, and those keywords determine how your page is ranked.
It’s important to clarify this, because several years ago, Google made it clear that neither meta descriptions nor keywords have any role in determining the rankings of the page or post. Other search engines may factor these in, and this varies from search engine to search engine.
Even though the meta description and keywords aren’t used to rank your page, the description is still important because, as mentioned earlier, it’s one of your last chances to grab a visitor. You’ll want to focus more on the in-page keywords rather than the meta keywords, because the former actually has a direct relation to the page’s fate on the search engines.
A word of caution here: there are plenty of companies and people who advertise on the Internet and in forums that they can provide SEO services for your website or blog. While many of these services are legitimate, make sure to do your research before paying for their services. Consult reviews, and check their rankings with the Better Business Bureau.
SEO can be a fun hobby, but it is important to a website, especially so if you’re running a commercial enterprise. If you choose to do SEO yourself–definitely a wise choice unless your website is a major undertaking that justifies the expense of outsourcing it–it can take a little time to find your footing, but you will soon find that you can easily drive traffic to your site by constructing keywords and descriptions that are perfect for your website.
