SEO Basics You Should Know

Even if you aren’t intending to be an SEO guru there are a few simple SEO concepts you should be aware of. First you should know who the major search engines are and how much of the market they command. The reason this is important is that if you have a limited amount of time, which most of us do, you should know where to focus your attention. Google is the behemoth, followed by Yahoo and MSN. It is important to remember to submit yourself to the other search engines such as DMOZ, but it does sometimes take weeks of even months for the search bots to index your site.

Next, you need to create a sitemap for Google and Yahoo if you don’t already have one. A sitemap is a simple xml or txt file that lists all the available pages on your website. It helps the bot going around to your site index it properly.

Also you want to make sure that you are bidding for reasonable keywords. Using keywords tools such as Overture can help you find valuable keywords for your niche. Once you’ve determined the best keywords for your goals make sure these words are entered in your meta data such as the title tags.

Then create relevant content for your site. Write articles, start a blog or even use articles from article directories. If visitors find value in the content on your site and think it’s interesting they will return and they will spread the word to others.

Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in building a site for the engines rather than the users, which is a mistake. While ranking high is important, if you have a site that isn’t clear and easy to understand visitors will leave immediately. And if you have many visitors that link to your site the search engines will take notice and your rankings will improve anyway.

Finally, the most important part of SEO currently is link building. Both Google and Yahoo base a lot of their ranking on how many links a site has. Obviously relevant links are better than non-relevant, but there are some non-relevant links that are okay, too. Directories like DMOZ.org or Yahoo! Directory are a great place to have links from because they have high pagerank. The text that is in these links are important as well so try to use keywords appropriate to your market.

While this is just the surface of SEO, it is a good place to start if you are a beginner or if you are trying to explain the process to another beginner. Once you grasp the basics then you can move further into the techniques of SEO.