What Is SEO?

SEO is important if you want to make sure your website has a prominent location on search engines like Google.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is used to optimize your website for a search engine. SEO can be quite difficult and time-consuming, but optimising can take you from the second page of google (Where only the truly dedicated searchers look) to the top three. Although no one really knows exactly what Google looks for, the community has enough information for you to bump yourself up the results.

How do I begin optimizing?

There are a few ways to get started to give your site a better look on search engines. First, you can use meta keyword, and meta description tags on your page, and begin using the title tag if you haven’t already.

The meta description tag tells Google what to display under the link to your page, while the meta keyword tag can help Google categorize your pages. The description tag is a short description of your page, while the keyword tag is used to list words or Pprases that are relevant to the content on the page. Remember to not write a long description, and don’t use a lot of keywords, or Google may penalize your website.

HTML SEO Tags:

<title>Page Title!</title>
<meta name="Description" content="This is the page description. It appears under the URL in a Google Search.">
<meta name="Keywords" content="learn html, learn css, web design">

Next, make sure that you are using header tags (<h1> - <h6>) appropriately, and if you aren’t using them at all, try adding one or two of them to each of your pages.Every page on your site should have one h1 tag, and it should convey the main idea of the page (So it should not be the same on every page). For example, the h1 tag on an article page should be the title of the article. When using header tags, make sure you don’t hide them, but you are free to make them look better with CSS. Other header tags (h2-h6) should only be used for important info, like sub-topics or the beginning of the comments section. Don’t use them for your body paragraphs!

The last way I will discuss here, before leaving you with links for further reading, will be to get people to link to you. Google sees incoming links as the key to an amazing site, so find other sites that are trustworthy and ask them to link to you. Be warned though, if a bad site links to you, their reputation may spread to you as well.

That’s not enough! I want to be the best!

Want to be the best in your category? It can be quite hard, if not impossible, but we wrote an entire article about getting to the top of the Google Results page. Check it out if you are ready for a rewarding challenge! When you are ready to read more about optimizing your website, our article is ready for you!

Conclusion

Hopefully, you learned how SEO is the key to having a successful website on Google. Although it can be a challenge, it is definitely one that we have accepted, and one that we will probably never finish (New SEO tactics seem to come out every day, and our website could always use some optimization)! If you have any questions or comments you would like to share with us, please let us know!