What makes Search Engine Optimization so vital?

The arena in which all the companies/sites work on the internet is equal, they get an equal platform and are equally placed in the beginning. In the case of small to medium websites, a visitor comes to know about them through search engines. Statistically put, around 76% of the web users in U.S and Canada use search engines. It can be concluded that search engines are the major referrers to a particular website. If a company knows how to place itself in good position on a search engine, its traffic will increase tremendously, and so will the sales. But unfortunately many of the businesses and websites do not know how to place themselves better on search engines. That’s where Search Engine Optimization comes in.

How does SEO works?
Starting from the starting, in order for a website to appear on a search engine, either it has to be manually submitted, or it has to be crawled by the bot of a search engine (eg. GoogleBot). Now, in order that the search engine rank the newly found website higher, SEO is required. The importance of ranking can be estimated from the fact that the results on the first page is viewed 78% more than those on pages 11-30.

Having good keywords and high amount of back links (link popularity) is the key to SEO. The more sites that link to you, the better you are placed on the search engines. Of course, the usage of the keywords (you are targeting) on the content of the site also has a significant impact on the rankings. Search engines like Google, pay a lot of attention to the backlinks part. It also improves the rankings if the links are from the sites that have content related to your site.

Coming to content, a famous saying goes, “Content is the King”. Whether it be some articles, or detailed information about the product you are selling, it will have a lot of impact on your rankings. Try to keep the articles unique and to the point.

Don’ts of SEO
Some companies try to use a short cut in SEO, the “Black Hat” SEO. What they do is rather than getting genuine backlinks from related sites, they create many websites, and give the link to the website they want to optimize. This results in instantaneous appraisal of rankings. Be warned that these methods are usually caught soon and the site in question may be permanently banned from the search engines.

Another big NO in SEO is over-using Flash and image content. This is because a search engine cannot read the text in images or Flash. This, however, has a workaround. One can use alt tag in images to provide the keywords for the image. Small captions above the image or the Flash content also helps.

SEO tips
Though meta tags are considered dead in SEO, they can be useful in categorizing or ranking your sites higher in some of the less advanced search engines.

Another way would be placing the keywords in the hyperlinks of the site. This makes an impression that your site has a lot of outgoing links to the relevant topic. This also improves the rankings.

Article By:
Innobuzz Knowledge Solutions.
Innobuzz offers Training courses on Online Marketing, SEO, DRBCP, Ruby on Rails &

Ethical Hacking.