SEO Basics

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of making your site “friendly” to search engines. There are really two aspects to SEO, one basic and one much more deep.

At the basic level, SEO consists of using “Metadata” (data that tells you something about your content) such as keywords, descriptions and more. Doing this has two purposes:

1. Using keywords, you can tell search engines what your site and site’s pages are all about clearly, thus telling the search engines for which search terms your site and site’s pages should appear in the search results; and
2. Using a description, you can provide search engines the text to be shown when your site shows up within their search results.

At the deeper level, SEO can be a cutthroat climb to the top of search engine results. You want your site and its pages to appear on the first page of results and as high-up on that page as possible (number 1 is always best!).

There are many ways to accomplish this, some more ethical than others.

The best methodology, in my humble opinion (and some folks may tell me that I am wrong which is fine because I believe in multiple approaches and using the one that works best for you), is to:

1. Use a keyword tool to find “juicy” keywords (search terms that folks search for often, but are not used in many other site’s keyword lists),
2. Put those “juicy” keywords on the appropriate pages of your site as metadata and assure that they appear in important spots within your content (the page title, the page headline, the page content (but do not overstuff)), and
3. Forget you did it and move on to the next article or post where you will rinse-wash-and-repeat.

You can sit there day-after-day looking at where you are in the search engine results. You can spend hours tweaking your articles and site to try and get higher in the rankings. But the bottom line is that if you follow the steps above, and keep producing good content with “juicy” keywords to which other sites link (because other folks love good content), then you will rise in the search engine results and find yourself on page one.

It just takes patience. 🙂

Phil Simon demonstrates some SEO basics in the video below.

Note: For a larger view, click on the box in the lower-right of the video after it starts to view it in full-screen mode.