Understanding the SEO Basics

To get the best from any SEO content provider, you need to understand the basics of SEO itself. From terminology to what method is more effective than others, even just understanding the SEO basics will help you plan ahead and know what you need from your next content requirement.

What is SEO?
SEO is short for search engine optimization. Just as the term suggests, this is the method of optimizing your website to offer it the best visibility to the various search engines. Without an SEO-friendly website, the chances of ranking high in the search engines is minimal and with today's ever-increasing online world, that could prove costly. So how do you optimize your website for effectively?

SEO Content
Whether it's keyword rich articles, blog posts or similar, one of the most effective methods of optimizing your website is with SEO content. Many websites make the mistake of simply putting some information regarding the company or website owner, without optimizing it for the search engines.

Using keywords relevant to your website's content is one of the best ways of optimizing your site. These keywords should be strong and strategically placed throughout your whole site (although your landing page should normally receive the most attention).

Keywords
To strengthen your website's SEO effectiveness, you need to use the right keywords relevant to what your website is about. Keywords are what people type into search engines to find the product or service they're after. However, simply using a basic keyword doesn't always work - you need to look at using long tail and organic keywords.

These are where you use a keyword phrase as opposed to a specific keyword itself. For example, say your website sells baby clothing - if you type that phrase into Google it comes back with over 6.5 million results. So unless you have an excellent SEO-friendly site, you're probably going to struggle to get noticed. Change your targeted keyword, however, and the results can be very different.

Instead of just using "baby clothing", try using something unique to you - this is called targeted keywords. "Designer baby clothing", for instance, comes back with only 557,000 results. Enhance it even further - use whatever city you're in. "Designer baby clothing in New York" comes back with 345,000 results. So you can see the benefits of using targeted keywords.

Use your Blog for SEO
Once seen as an outlet for lonely people in their bedroom's, blogs are now one of the most effective methods of increasing your site's SEO. Businesses have come to realize this and there are very few businesses now that don't have a blog on their company website.

The reason for the popularity of blogs when it comes to the SEO-friendliness of your site is that they offer a way to keep the content of your website fresh. Search engines offer higher ranking to websites that have fresh and unique content - what better way to do this than via a blog that can be updated regularly?

Additionally, blogs are excellent ways to let your customers or readers know of any changes instantly, which ensures that any news you need to share is available immediately. Yet perhaps by their very nature, blogs offer a wonderfully easy way to enhance your website's SEO due to the way you can use targeted keywords for each blog post, without impacting on the overall SEO on your site.

Although there are other points to take into consideration when it comes to your website's SEO - the URL, the meta tags, the description, etc - the basic methods above will help you climb the search engine ladder. To really benefit from what your website can offer you, use a dedicated SEO content provider to really make your traffic fly.