SEO For Dummies (Like Me)

photo credit: kaztor 

“SEO for Dummies” because many times I visit blogs that are about blogging and, since most of their visitors are bloggers themselves, they don’t explain clearly and simply anymore what certain terms mean. It’s like they think everybody knows already, what’s the point of explaining common terms like that?

There’s all this talk about SEO, and how important it is for your blog. I don’t know much about the technical part of it, but here’s what I understood about it so far:

SEO is Search Engine Optimization. Search engines do not have humans working on listing the web’s content, there are way too many sites out there for humans to handle. So they have programs called spiders, crawlers or bots that do the job. These programs basically “scan” all the web’s content, jumping from one site to the other, keeping track of everything they find. They count the number of times certain words come up on your page, and classify it accordingly for the key words it mostly uses.

What these ”crawlers” do is index everything they find on a particular blog/site, in a huge database. SEO is very complex, and hard to be maintained always at the best level, since search engines look at a number of things when “rewarding” a site with rank. Every search engine gives more importance to different things, and optimizing your site for all of them is difficult.

For example, Google and Yahoo! are considered the most used search engines. For Google, the age of a site is important, so the oldest your site, the better it will rank. Also the number of sites linking back to yours is important, and the key words of course.

Due to many webmasters trying to cheat their way into the rankings of Google, now it’s become harder to get a rank, and you have to be very careful. Don’t do link exchanges just for the sake of ranking or use link farms, the engine doesn’t like unnatural links and you’ll be penalized. The relevance of the links pointing back to your site is very important, you will not get too many benefits from a site that has nothing to do with your niche, or a site that’s not seen well by Google.

Using keywords, especially in the title and at the beginning of a post, is very important, but at the same time don’t forget you’re writing mainly for humans, not crawlers. So make it attractive at the same time, and avoid being ridiculous by using the same word over and over again.

Crawlers cannot see pictures! So you’ll have to use the ALT attribute to the IMG tag to add some text to them, so the spiders know there’s something there, and not just a blank space.

Conclusion

There are SEO professionals out there that just deal with optimizing sites for search engines, so don’t feel bad if you don’t really know how to do it. You can hire one, or learn the basics by yourself. You will probably never get your site as optimizes as you’d like, so just try and do the basics: link naturally and to related sites, don’t do anything shady that will get you banned, use the right keywords in the right places, and always add ALT attribute to your images.

I hope you’ve enjoyed it, please leave a comment. What do you think about SEO? What techniques do you use for SEO?

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