One of the most common terms floating around the internet for website owners is SEO, but what does that actually mean? When broken down to its most basic level, SEO stands for search engine optimization. This means taking your website and enhancing it to be able to get natural and free ranking within the first results on most common search engines. Most people desire to be the top ranked result when people search on Yahoo, Bing, or Google for their website’s specific niche. The more you can do to help your site rank within the top results from one of these search engines, the more you are SEO’d on your site.
How Do You SEO a Website?
There are many common techniques that people turn to for SEO purposes. There are techniques that you can do within your website that affect your ranking. These are known as on-site SEO techniques. There are also techniques that have an external effect on your website. These are known as off-site SEO techniques. Both of these techniques involve you getting your website noticed, but both of them take very different approaches as to how they make that happen. Which method you choose to use on your website can determine the type of ranking your website gets naturally, or without paying services that rank your website up higher.
What Are Common On Site SEO Techniques?
Some of the most common on site SEO techniques include creating title tags for your website pages, adding keywords to your website’s content, adding in different headers with the keywords you are looking to rank for, and linking your site to authoritative sites that prove you know what you are talking about. Each of these techniques allow the search engines to see that your website is focused on specific keywords and ideas. The more informative and current your website is in the eyes of the search engines, the better your natural ranking will be. However, you have to remember that you have competition most of the time, so you have to be more informative, more accurate, or more current than your competitors to rank higher than them. This is especially true if they have been around longer than you have.
What Are Common Off-Site SEO Techniques?
Off-site SEO tactics, on the other hand, involve doing things outside of your website to get more attention brought to it. Some common off-site SEO techniques include posting guest blogs that link back to your site on other high-ranking blogs, submitting your site to forums or directories, submitting press releases when you have a new product or service to offer the public, reaching out to the public through social media outlets, and commenting on other blogs with a link back to your site within the comment. These are all things you must do if your focus is off-site on a regular basis. The more current each of these techniques is, the better chances your website has at getting a good ranking out of them.
While no single SEO tactic will boost your website right up to the number one slot on a search engine overnight, when the techniques are able to work together, this is often the case for your website. It takes time, dedication, building up of trust with your visitors, and some hard work, but in the end, a highly ranking website is going to bring you visitors, business, and esteem within your field. Take the time to make your website run the way you want it to, and it will work for you right back. Enjoy the prestige and revenue that a solidly SEO’d site can offer.
SOURCES:
http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/12-basic-on-site-seo-tactics-for-optimized-results/5966/
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2107974/Successful-SEO-Tactics-Off-Site-Optimization
