What Does SEO Stand For?

What does SEO stand for anyways? Let’s cut to the nitty gritty shall we? SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the process by which you take a series of steps in order to optimize your website. The final result you hope to achieve is world domination (just kidding). What you want to achieve is a well written website that naturally ranks in the major search engines. This action of ranking well, will then attract hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your site each and every month. It is up to you to monetize that traffic and produce an income for yourself and/or your family.

So what are the basics of SEO? How does one go about getting their website to rank well? Believe it or not, the algorithms that the search engines use have not changed much over the years, regardless of what you may think. Sure duplicate content has been scraped out, “thin” sites have been washed away, and I could go on forever. The important thing to realize is that the fundamental basics have and will probably be the same for a long time to come. What gets you ranking well?

The first is content. You need content, unique content, and lots of it. Write about what pleases you if it is a hobby site. Write as much as you can. If that isn’t your cup of tea, then outsource it. No matter what market or niche you are in, you should have a well written website that is somewhat “large” in scale. Now I put large in quotes because it is a relative term. When scoping out your competition, you should analyze the top 5 results for the keywords of your choice. Upon doing so, see how many pages make up that site. You can do this by doing a “site:url.com” search in Google.

This should bring back the number of pages that site contains, or at least a rough estimate. If all of the websites in this market only have 100-200 pages, then you should strive to make yours 230 pages. You don’t want to overdue it though and go and create 2,000 pages – unless of course, you want to get a lot of long tail traffic. The point is, try and maintain a consistent look for your website, that is on par with the rest of the market but taking it a simple step further and going that extra mile.

The second factor that will not change “much” is links. The more the merrier (in quality and relevance of course). You want to get other websites linking to you that contain the phrase you want to rank for. It’s really as simple as that. If you own a site about horse racing, then make sure to get other horse racing websites to link over to you. If they are quality too, then you can return the favor. Keep in mind that you do not want to link to shady neighborhoods, as this will negatively affect your ranking. So in short, get that content going and get those links churning.