Why do I need SEO?

Or maybe a better question is what is SEO. It stands for Search Engine Optimization, and is the art of  tweaking the on-page  and off-page elements of your site. This usually means tweaking your web site using design elements and content — and in most cases, it also means spending no money at all.

Search Engine Marketing or SEM is what most businesses mean when they say SEO. SEM is about doing whatever is necessary to make sure your site ranks well in the search engines results. This means that not only do you ensure that your site has been optimized for the search engines you also engage in other activities, such as pay per click  advertising , link building or content strategies.

Ultimately, the whole point of SEO or SEM is to bring more traffic to your site and have more eyes viewing your content or products. You can do that by improving your search engines results or you can also do that by taking advantage of a growing phenomenon on the Web — social media. We will be discussing social media more in a future article, but for now how can you go about optimizing your site for search engines.

Analyze

The very first step is to analyze the code of your site. There are various W3C validators available for free that will analyze your site and let you know it the markup is written correctly. In recent years the use of meta tags, have been one of the most important features on your website. Meta tags are html tags embedded in the source files used to ‘tell’ search engines what that page is about. Nowadays, meta tags are just one of many important on page elements that affect Search Engine Placement.  Other elements are:

  • Domain name and URL’s
  • Page Content
  • Link Structure
  • Usability and accessibility
  • Meta tags
  • Page structure

True on page SEO is the sum of all these elements combined. Each one weighs on the final outcome. But that actual weight given to each element is only known to the search engines.

As you can see on-page SEO does require a strong understanding of HTML, if you are not comfortable with looking or editing source code , I would recommend hiring a professional to go over your code for you.

In my next post I will look at how you can start to optimize your site, to get the best search engine rankings you can.

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