[php snippet=1] What is SEOSearch Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective things you can do online. It is the process of getting your website optimized to enable search engines to send traffic your way. The concept of SEO is not really as simple as people think, but it is very important to get your webpage recognized on the search engines. If it is not optimized, you will not get higher search engine rankings. SEO may generally target different kinds of search, including local search, video search, academic search, news search and so forth.

SEO also considers how search engines work, which search engines are preferred by target visitors, what people search for, how search engines work, and the actual keywords typed. Getting a website optimized may involve things like removing barriers to the indexing activities, HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and related coding, as well as editing the webpage’s content. Increasing the number of inbound links or backlinks is another SEO strategy.

In simple words, SEO is an understanding of how search algorithms work and the knowledge of what web visitors might search for. The main goal is to create a website that contains content which human users will likely search when looking for information. With that said, it should be noted that there are two types of SEO: on page and off page.

On Page

On page SEO is the process of making your web page rank higher on Google/Bing/Yahoo search results. There are several ways to do this.

Meta tags: This is basically a short description of what your web page is all about. The purpose of a Meta tag is to tell search engines more about your page. They are words that show up below the link to a page in search engine results. Though adding keyword to a Meta tag is not very relevant, you can still add it if you want.

Keyword Density: Keyword density is the number of times a keyword shows up on a web page. It is typically measured in percentage. It is difficult to know the number of times a keyword ought to appear on a page. Even so, it is highly discouraged to overuse a keyword in a webpage. Your site may get penalized by search engines.

URL of the page: URL of the page is a key factor to its ranking. A good URL should have keywords in them, not punctuation marks and numbers. Also, Google/Bing/Yahoo prefers using hyphens rather than underscores in URL names.

Off Page SEO

Off page SEO can also affect the ranking of a page. Backlinks is one of the major off page factors. Backlinks is basically the number of links pointing to a webpage. The more quality links a site gets the higher the PageRank they have. This is one of the most important factors Google/Bing/Yahoo considers when ranking pages. There are many factors that influence off page SEO but backlinks are probably most basic factor.

Content is King

While there are several ways to make your page rank higher on a Google/Bing/Yahoo search result, the most important thing is to have high quality content. That is the most important thing search engines focus on when ranking web pages. Good content means that it is well-researched and well-written. Writing great content is also one of the reasons you will get most of your backlinks. When people are impressed with articles on your website, they definitely want to link theirs to you.

A SEO Company

Last but not least, you will need to hire a SEO company if you want to get the most out of your website. Be sure to choose the right company, since not all SEO firms are created equal.