SEO stands for search engine optimization.
As a website owner, or business owner with a website, you want to appear as high as possible in the organic rankings when someone searches for a keyword or phrase related to what you offer.
Before we discuss optimizing a webpage or website for the search engines with the goal of appearing on page one of the results, we must first dissect what a search engine is. A search engine is nothing more than a huge index of the internet.
If you’ve ever heard the term “spider” that “crawls” the web, all that is is a computer that indexes the internet. This spider uses complex algorithms to rank webpages in terms of relevance to any particular search phrase.
After any search, the search engine will rank the relevant webpages in order from most relevant on page one to least relevant on the last page.
Furthermore, a one word search will return many more results than a longtail keyword. A one word keyword will return millions upon millions of relevant sites on hundreds of results pages. A long keyword, like a sentence, will return much less, if any results at all.
Everyone and their mother will want to rank for the keyword “real estate” so the competition in a keyword like that will be extremely competitive. The term “Greenwich Real Estate” will be less competitive and “cape cod for sale in Greenwich Connecticut real estate” will have even less competition and search results.
Ok, now to the optimization part.
Go to Google.
When you search for something and hit search, the next page that pops up is page one of the results. You may see sponsored sites or advertisements at the top of the results and also to the right, those are not the organic results.
Organic results are the webpages that the search engine goes out and fetches as most relevant to your search.
Out of the organic search engine results, the webpage in the first position gets 40% of the clicks, paid or organic. 40% of all the search traffic!
On a side note, the last result on page one gets the second most hits at 9%.
So the number one spot gets the lion’s share of the traffic.
So, how do you get to the top spot?
To be continued…
