For those of you who don’t live and breathe by the term SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization, or otherwise, the tactics used to make your website appear higher on search engine result pages. SEO methods can be a bit of a mire, and there are endless “services” out there that claim to help. Many of these work well, but there are also many which are not worth the money and can actually do more harm than good.
The best bet for novice website owners, or those who are starting a new website, is to do your own SEO for a while. Once you see who is coming to your website (via Google Analytics), you can then start utilizing more advanced methods and paid solutions to getting more people to your site.
SEO is based completely on one thing; text. Bots (web crawler programs that roam the internet) only read text. Text is the commodity of the internet. Bot technology is getting very sophisticated, and some of the most impressive advancements in AI are coming from internet bot evolution. The Bots roam around the internet reading everything they can and trying to make sense of it, that is how websites get listed on Google and Yahoo in the first place. Bots are not yet intelligent enough to know what your website is really about unless you utilize the right “keywords.” The term keywords really means text that is relevant to what you are talking about. If text is the commodity of the internet, keywords are the way text is valued. The basic idea is, if you want to be ranked high on Google for what you are talking about, you need to mention that thing many times. And more often than not, this requires stating the obvious.
For example, lets say you operate a watch store online. You sell various watch brands, lets say Omega, Tissot, and Sinn. Your website might mention a few times the watch models you sell, and prices, and a bit about the watches themselves, but are you ever going to just flat out say “this is a watch store online?” No you aren’t, because that is stating the obvious and really silly. But for SEO purposes you have to do that. Bots read text, they don’t know what your website does, they are blind and have no common sense. You need to mention what you are specifically, many times, and have relevant links. So back to our online watch store example; on various places in the website, the operator should write: “watch store, Omega watch store, Tissot watch store, Sinn Watch Store, watches store, etc…” The purposes behind this is capture search audience. Most people aren’t going to know the name of the store, instead, they will be relying on other search terms in order to get there, such as by the product or the type of website they want to reach.
The lesson here, is that you need to state in the most redundant of fashions, what your website is, what it does, and why people are going to visit it. Doing enough of that, and having both relevant incoming and outgoing links, will ensure a good degree of SEO success and ultimately result in more traffic coming to your website.
So for me, I ought to start plugging away, “watch blog, watches blog, watch buying guide, etc…” I should also have an article saying, if you want to read about watches, and watch issues, then you should come to ablogtowatch.com. It should be pretty obvious to any reader that they are on a watch blog, but not to the bots which make internet search possible. Lastly, remember that once you implement these additions to any website, the result are not immediate. It can days, weeks, or even months before the bots come back to your site. So be patient, and keep creating content. Just because you can access information instantaneously, doesn’t mean it is available that fast.