The Basics of Search Engine Optimization

SEO can be easy or hard – it’s your choice, really; here, we’ll focus on doing things the easy way. Search engine optimization is a term which covers various strategies for making your website more visible in the search engines and maintaining this visibility.

There are paid methods of search engine optimization like Google AdWords and other pay per click advertisements, but what we’re going to talk about here are free SEO methods to drive traffic to your site through the search engines.

To make things very simple, there are two things which you need to focus on here: you need to make sure that your website tells the search engines exactly what its content is about and try to get other people spreading the word about your website to the search engines.

Getting your site noticed by the search engines and making sure that they know what your site is about is done through on-site SEO. This includes filling your website with high quality content which is relevant to the topic of your site and including headings, subtitles and image alt tags which use words which make it easy for Google and other search engines to determine what the topic of your site happens to be. There’s obviously a lot more to it than just this, but this is a good start towards letting Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines understand what your site is all about. If you don’t make it clear through your content and other onsite factors, the search engines won’t be able to tell and people will have a difficult time finding your site through search queries.

Getting other sites to spread the word about your site consists of what is known as offsite SEO. This largely has to do with building links to your site from other sites; this is by far the most important part of offsite SEO, so this is where you should dedicate the majority of your energy. If it can get you links, it should be a priority for you.

Some examples of link building strategies include writing articles and submitting them to directories, commenting on other people’s blogs, contributing to blogs as a guest writer, building and maintaining a Squidoo lens or other secondary website, using Facebook and Twitter, writing and submitting press releases, creating online videos, using social bookmarking services like Digg and Stumble Upon, leaving comments on forums and anything and everything else that can help create more links to your site from relevant sites.

You could easily write an entire book on building backlinks alone, but since we’re just going over some of the basics here, you’ll have to keep reading to learn more about link building and other traffic generating SEO strategies.