Nowadays where millions of web pages linger the web, getting noticed has become a worse headache than it ever was. It is, however, not impossible to increase your site viewership just because tons of other websites are all over the internet. Search engines can help sites increase their viewership by increasing traffic through search engine result pages (SERPs). To be on top of SERPs, websites must rely on a delicate concept now being widely used all over the web – search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO relies on how search engines work such that your site gets suggested on the top results. Say, for example, you have decided to create a website focusing on computer accessories. Even with the best articles and multimedia contents, viewers may still end up with sites that contain mediocre contents. Why? Because your site is not yet registered on SERPs by these search engines, your site may not be given the priority, as is told by Nashville SEO Guy.
Probably the most important thing to remember is that search engines have spiders and crawlers they use to search the web for relevant contents. Such spiders and crawlers can search for the most relevant keywords from millions of sites in just seconds. So if your article is about computer accessories and you put titles or keywords such as gaming performance and improving processor speed in your articles, search engines may deem your content irrelevant and instead search content from your competitors. There’s no way for spiders and crawlers to know that you have articles about computer accessories unless you use such terminologies.
Next to keywords is link-building. Since the ‘90s where search engines were still starting to emerge and establish their dominance, link-building has already been used to provide only relevant searches on the internet. Link-building relies on the concept that the more people there are posting links that redirect viewers to your site, the more reliable your site must be. In this regard, most webmasters communicate with fellow site owners to post links to their websites. The more links there are directing to your site, the more appealing your site becomes to search engines. Some sites, however, may provide links to other sites without telling search engines that they are voting for such sites. This is through the nofollow tag.
Other techniques used include Meta tags. Meta tags are keywords only visible to search engines. These are details that contain tags that search engines use to determine relevance. Nowadays, however, the use of Meta Tags has considerably decreased because most sites take advantage of Meta tags to fool search engines into believing their site content’s relevance. This goes in line with the Lead Conversion Squared bonus.
If there are fair and legitimate ways to be on top of the search results, there are also unscrupulous ways that must be avoided and frowned upon. One of which includes keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is employed by adding texts that may increase chances of being noticed by search engines. Such texts may be placed at the bottom part of web pages where readers won’t be able to notice them. Some unethical sites even blend these texts with the background color. This way readers won’t be able to notice them. Search engines, on the other hand, will be able to.
Another unaccepted practice in SEO is the use of farming links. Through this practice, webmasters buy hundreds of links from other sites and take advantage of link-building to get their web pages on the top results. Though it may seem that these sites provide legitimate content they are, in reality, just linking against one another. Search engines are then fooled as to these sites’ credibility.
These kinds of practices, however, should not worry other ethical sites. Since most search engines have evolved their algorithms, such deceitful tactics have now gotten easier to discover. Once search engines deem a website as spam or just an irrelevant site pretending to be otherwise, it would be next to impossible being on top of the search results again.
If there’s one last thing you should know, it is that SEOs shouldn’t overwhelm you. They sound complicated only at first. Ones you’ve gotten the hang of it, understanding it would be as easy as eating. Whether you’re a site master or just a regular blogger wishing for more readers, SEO is something that you should understand. In the end, who wants a page with no audience?