Learning SEO Basics

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a set of practices that a website owner uses to help improve a site’s visibility and effectiveness in search engines. A website must cater to search engines, for the most part, because a vast majority of people use search engines to find what they’re looking for. If a business wants to attract more visitors to its site, the business should pay attention to SEO as part of the design and structure of its website.

Some companies and websites don’t want to use SEO practices on their websites. Not everyone wants to have their websites appear in search engines, and some could care less if their website addresses appear at the top of search engine results. For example, if a company creates a website that’s for employees of that company only, they generally want to keep this website a secret and only publicize the site to employees of that company. In that case, the company won’t use SEO techniques on that website. If a company puts a website online with secret information that requires a password, they also won’t want the search engine to find this information. Company websites, or any other kind of website that thrives on lots of visitors, however, will want to use SEO to increase the number of people who visit the website.

There are several methods used within SEO, the most important of which include keyword optimization and HTML tag optimization. These methods, along with high usability—defined as how useful a site is to the visitor—make up the practices of SEO. Each of these practices serves as one way that SEO practitioners can utilize to gain visitors through search engines. Alone, these practices might make modest gains in page rank, but together, the various SEO methods can dramatically affect traffic. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees for increasing traffic due to the increasing popularity of SEO practices and changing search engine technology.

Search engines are notoriously secretive about their page ranking algorithms and policies. Some information is public knowledge and some is pure speculation on the part of SEO and search engine experts. There are plenty of reasons why search engines would want to keep ranking information secret. First, consider how search engines functioned a decade or more ago and to understand what can happen when people exploit search engine algorithms. Unscrupulous marketers would use the weaknesses of search engine ranking methods in order to place their pages at the top of search engine rankings, even under keywords that had nothing to do with the website itself. Today’s search engines have beefed up their formulas, so to speak, and eliminated many of those problems. However, there are plenty of people willing to take advantage of any weaknesses in search engine algorithms, which is why this information isn’t always available to the general public.

There are many people that practice SEO for a living. Large companies that rely heavily on their websites, or companies that exist only online, often employ in-house SEO experts that can tailor a page to be friendly to search engines. Smaller websites can hire SEO consultants to go over and help optimize the client’s page for search engine usage. Even amateur webmasters can benefit from using SEO techniques in the pages they build. Using SEO techniques can be as simple and as complicated as the website owner wants depending on their time and budget constraints. There’s no definite “right” or “wrong” way to fully optimize a website.

There are also scams associated with SEO. Some consulting companies will make a big fuss about how SEO works, and claim that they can dramatically or even magically improve a site’s page ranking and visibility within a search engine. SEO is not magic. These companies can’t guarantee dramatic results because they’re not likely to happen right away, if at all. Some of these companies simply deal in providing an inferior product. They might guide a customer through spamming practices or not even give the customer an adequate service. Websites should be vigilant about the SEO consultants they hire for this reason.

Ultimately, having an expert in SEO is helpful because improving search engine visibility is a cost effective and useful way to gain visitors. With enough learning and practice, almost anyone can become an SEO expert. That’s what makes the expense or the trouble worth the hassle. So many people use search engines that not maintaining SEO standard may hurt a site’s ability to get visitors.

Clearpath Technology is a SEO Firm providing Link Building, Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing services. For more details, visit http://www.clearpathtechnology.com or visit physically at Clearpath Technology, 2nd & 3rd Floor, Anshul Plaza, Sector-10, Plot-8, Dwarka, New Delhi-110075, India. You can also call +91-9958844066 or toll free 1-877- 453- 8080.

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