Simple and common sense approach to SEO
Everyone may have heard of the term Search Engine Optimation. This is one of the very important topic a website owner should be well aware of. As a result of efforts put in to SEO, it will determine the ranking in major search engines. It's a common sense to know the higher ranks you are at, more clicks that you will be able to receive to your landing page.
Having this common sense approach to SEO is very important otherwise you might not like the results you expect to get. One common sense is that you need is to look at the whole thing from search engine companies' perspective. Afterall, these are the sites that you want to get ranked on, right?
Simply put, their core business is in advertisement, and paradoxically, it's the quality organic search results that they can produce that will get them to attract more advertisers. Hence, while revenue from advertising bring them the bread and butter, the quality organic search results is the backbone of these search engine companies' core competencies. The more quality search results, the more new and repeating users, and the more users means the more advertisers willing to pay higher amounts, and so on and so forth.
Hence, for search engine companies, it is to their best interest to weed out the bad and rank the good ones high. Then, what is a "good" page, you might ask? It's the relevant page to the keyword/phrases typed in by the users. Think about it! If, as a search engine user, you type in a keyword, and top results you get back are a bunch of sites full of advertisement or irrelevant sites, then it's likely that you won't be using that search engine any more.
Therefore, the most important buzz word for major search engine companies is "Relevancy"!
Relevancy should also be your, as a site owner, buzz word as well, and apply to your site structure design, copywriting, images, and even traffics that you target to generate to your website. Having this relevant traffic to you site is equally important as this can impact your top and bottomline directly. As an extension to the SEO efforts, Search Engine Marketing is another important topic you, as a site owner, should be well aware of.
Now, going back to SEO topic, Google, the top search engine company with well over 50% market share, claims that they have over 200 factors that they would use to determine the relevancy of a web page. Did you catch that? Google is determining the relevancy of a web page, not the whole website. This is important to understand because if there are few keywords of phrases that you would be competing for, you need to think about how to position your pages that you want to optimize based on relevant keywords/phrases.
Out of over 200 factors that Google determines the relevancy of the page, basically these are divided into two main sections. One is what the website claims it to be and the other is what other websites say that your website is about. This is again simple to understand, and is a common sense. For example, if a website claims that it's the authoratative website for SEO, and others recognize it, then they will validate the website's claim by linking to the website. Think of it as how the quoting works. People tend to quote more famous people's words to validate their points. Same thing is done in ranking.
A word of wisdom of 80/20 rules hold true in SEO as well. As mentioned above, page relevancy is determined by two factors. Known as on-page factors, these are the things that what the website claims to be. In a nutshell, the on-page factors that affects 80% are the following:
- - Title Tags
- - Keyword/phrases density
- - Site Structures
- - Internal links
Known as off-page factors, these are "validations" of you claims from others. In a nutshell, all off-page factors are related to incoming links to your site. The incoming links are important in relevancy determination because these are "validations" to your claim. The incoming links are further categorized in to the following:
- - Page rank
- - Page reputation
- - Link popularity