A native of Varna, Bulgaria, I developed a passion for helping others and realized the value of networking while working in the tourism industry, showing people around my native land. At the same time, my love for all things digital grew; since the early days of the internet, in the late 1990s, I have had a strong interest in computers and the online world. Over the last 5 years I have honed my skills, learning about all things SEO-related and developing many blogs and websites. In this blog, I share the latest SEO news and knowledge, helping you to get your sites ranked higher by Google and other popular search engines. I have experience with several Blogger and Wordpress SEO templates, and I have a free Blogger SEO template available for use.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the strategy by which one attains greater visibility for his or her website by following a plan of action that will achieve a high ranking for that website in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results. The higher your website ranks, the closer to the top of the list it sits (i.e., appearing on the first page of Google as one of the top ten listings, rather than on the sixth page of results). Most people who search for a specific topic or product will only look at the first page or two of Google results; therefore, when your page is high on that list, it receives vastly more visitor traffic than a site that sits on the fourth or fifth page of Google results. Due to the fact that people often don’t look beyond the first couple pages of Google results, having good or bad SEO practices can easily make or break a business or organization.SEO can be streamlined to target different kinds of searches, such as image searches, local searches, video searches, academic searches, news searches, etc.
An effective SEO strategy has to account for many variables, including how different search engines work, what people search for, what actual keywords they are likely to type into search engines during their search attempts, and which search engines are the most popular with the target audience of your product or website. Optimizing a website often involves creating (or editing) content to function in a way that is friendlier to search engine rankings, editing the site’s HTML and associated coding to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines, and making sure content is properly “tagged,” among other activities. Accruing quality back-links and promoting a website via social media is another essential tool by which rankings are increased.
In addition to the complexity of designing a website for optimal SEO function, the field of SEO is highly dynamic, as search engines often change the algorithms by which they rank websites.
The principles that govern structuring a site for optimal SEO will also build a site that is highly user-friendly to people, because SEO best practices require a site to have a clear hierarchy and text links that interconnect each page, making it easier for users to get where they want to go. Google also favors useful, information-rich websites, images with relevant "title" elements and ALT attributes (the latter of which also make your site much more accessible to the visually impaired). You have to keep in mind the fact that Google wants the best websites to rank the highest; SEO is not the act of “fooling” a search engine into putting your website first, but rather to improve your website so that it deserves to hold a higher ranking, which is key to the long-term success of your SEO strategy. Search engines are very good at detecting anything that even remotely looks like spam (and have harsh penalties for those sites they believe are trying to cheat the system), so looking natural and building websites with genuine thought and care is essential, and something any good SEOptimizer will strive to do.
A good SEOptimizer will also know what kind of content search engines have a hard time “seeing” (and therefore a hard time ranking); content that is hidden behind a password (i.e., you have to log in to access it) typically cannot be seen by Google. Similarly, images, Flash files, Java applets, and other forms of non-text content are often passed over entirely by search engine “crawlers,” meaning that the meat of your site’s content should always be in text and HTML form.