What is SEO?

SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of maximizing a website’s organic (free) visits from search engines like Google. Keywords or keyphrases are used to search for web pages via the search engines.

A typical google search would look this this:
 


What is SEO?

    
The results circled in orange are ads that webmasters pay for through a program like Google Adwords, and the results circled in green is your organic (free) results. This page is called a SERP (search engine results page). Your objective is to write your InfoBarrel articles with good keywords that will get you to page 1 or 2 of the search results. To be able to do this, we need to learn more about how SEO works.

Note: To date I have not earned one single cent from this blog and I have only earned $2.20 from my InfoBarrel articles. I have 11 articles on InfoBarrel at the time of writing this page (27 Jan 12). As soon as I've studied how SEO works and how I can best use keywords to increase my traffic, I will edit my articles and the posts on this blog to make them more attractive to the search engines. This is only the beginning.

To understand how SEO works, we have to know how search engines work. Search engines have robots, sometimes called spiders, that crawl the web and collect information of what all the web pages are about. That's why you need keywords for your site or page. The spiders will pick up these strategically-placed keywords on your web page and place your site in a specific index. When somebody searches for these keywords, your site will be displayed on the SERP. Below you can see that there are 562 000 000 results for the specific search term! That means that your page with that keyword phrase is in competition with millions and millions of other pages. Time to search for another search phrase with less competition.

What is SEO?

   

In what order are the results displayed by the search engine?

Google has many factors to consider when deciding which pages to display where on the SERP. It makes use of a ranking system, whereby the web pages are assigned points and these points are used to rank the website. The site with the highest points will be displayed on top and the site with the lowest points would be placed right at the bottom of the last page.

In order get your ranking higher, you should consider the following with regards to your keyword or phrase:

• Your keyword must be in your URL. (The name of your site - http://www/.......)
• Your keyword must be in your page title. The title of this page of mine is "What is SEO?".
• It must appear in your heading 1 and heading 2. Please don't use the same phrase as your title in your headers. Use your same keyword or key phrase, but vary the sentence. When you write your first article for InboBarrel, you will be shown where you must insert your headings.
• It must appear throughout your page at a ratio of about 2%. In other words, if you have a 400 page article, your keyword must appear approximately 8 times. This is called keyword density.
• You must include synonyms (words that has the same meaning as your keyword) throughout your article.
• Use your keyword as your anchor text in your links. This is a link to my InfoBarrel profile. Assuming that my keyword here is "InfoBarrel".
• When inserting pictures in your article, use your keyword in the caption of your picture. A caption is a description on top or below the picture. On this page the phrase: "What is SEO?" that can be seen underneath my pictures, is my caption.

If you stick to the above, you are halfway there.

Other factors to consider for high SEO ranking:

• Your page must come from a high-quality site, not from a spam site. Fortunately, if you write for InfoBarrel, you can rest assured that this criteria has been met.
• Your page must be linked to other pages on the web. (More on that later).
• Make use of social sites like Facebook, Twitter, My Space, Stumble Upon, and many others to promote your articles.

On the InfoBarrel site, go and read some of the articles under "InfoBarrel University" relating to SEO, keywords and ranking. The InfoBarrel community is very generous with their tips and they thrive on helping others becoming successful. Once I become a bit more of an authority on Internet Marketing and writing content for the web, I will also help all the newbies. Hopefully this blog will succeed in helping others - that is what it is intended for.

Now that we know how SEO works, it is time to go and study keywords - short tail keywords, long tail keywords, where to look for keywords, which free tools are available to do keyword research, etc. I will study keywords and post an entry on this blog about how to do keyword research. Once that is done, I will edit this blog as well as my 11 InfoBarrel articles and see if I can get more traffic to my blog and my articles on InfoBarrel. Once I have achieved that, I will look at other ways to monetize my content to make more money.

To re-cap:

What is SEO? SEO is a clever way to place keywords or key phrases on your web pages so that the search engines can know what your pages are about and index it. By applying SEO techniques, your pages will rank higher with the search engines and stand a good chance to be on page 1 or 2 or the SERP's.