Search Engine Optimization Definition & A Brief Note On It

If you’re not already aware of what SEO is, hearing people talking about doing SEO of their sites, reading many webmasters writing about their successful experience from search engine optimization, and then coming across several SEO experts talking about their profession might have made you think pretty hard about this one little term, isn’t it?

All that you need to have is a steady and straight forward Search Engine Optimization Definition to be thoroughly clear about the term.

In a layman’s language, it is an online marketing technique used for improving your online presence, gaining traffic, and thereby helping your business grow. But any idea what has it to with the search engines?

Let’s start from the very beginning or say from the basics. Imagine you have a business site through which you sell your stuffs which can be any kind of products or services or say you have an information site through which you provide people with latest news and time to time information and earn through the ads placed on your site. It can be anything; you can have any kind of site. Whatever be the kind of your site but surely you have just one aim and that is to have your site flourish well, do better business, and earn you a lot of profit. That’s what you want, isn’t it?

How do you think will your site flourish, do a better business, and earn you a lot of profit? The same thing that you do for your brick-and-mortar shop i.e. publicity, advertising, branding, and so on, if to say this all in one word, it is a kind of marketing.

We market our things so that people can have a look at them and get to know about them and finally decide to buy them. When it comes to online business, it is an obvious that your customers are going to be internet surfers who generally use the search engines for searching out what they want.

This is how SEO came into being and this is why it has its connections with the search engines. With the help of SEO, your site is worked out in such a way that it gets displayed on the topmost places of the search result pages when a searcher uses the search engine to search out what they want.

The optimization is done in two ways; first it is directly done to your site, which involves various steps all with one aim i.e. to bring your website on the topmost place in the search result pages for certain set of words using which the searchers search the net, this method is called On Page Optimization. Second, it is the indirect way by which your site is helped to get better position on the result pages. In this method nothing is done on your site but everything that is done includes the link to your site or page to get inbound links and traffic. This method is known as Off Page Optimization.

On Page Optimization includes steps like placing the right kind of keywords or search terms in right position on your site, making your site user friendly (so that the search engines find your site worthy and your placing on them become stronger and even the users love to visit you.), make your site relevant, adding right kind or description in your Meta Description, and so on.

Off Page Optimization includes various activities like submitting your website to directories and search engines, writing useful articles, and submitting them on various sites, writing content for your corporate blog, bookmarking your site on social bookmarking sites and so on.

Finally, as a beginner you need to remember that all that you do has two main purpose, first to be loved and respected by the search engines so that they like to index you and consider you for your position in the search result pages. This is because the search engines have their own algorithms as deciding factors that decide whether you are useful or not and only if they find you useful you find a better place on the search result pages. Second, your visibility to the searchers, so that when they are searching the internet they can easily find you, but also remember that some people misuse the things in the name of SEO and what they do is an illegal way of doing the thing which is known as Black Hat SEO, you should stay away from it and learn only the legal way to popularize your site.

The above mentioned search engine optimization definition and brief note may not cover every aspect of SEO but surely it’ll give enough insight to the beginners.

3 most fascinating Search Engine Optimization tips and tricks

It is the visibility of your site in the search engine result pages that brings you the biggest part of your site traffic. Better the visibility of your site, the more is the traffic and Search Engine Optimization proves the possible weapon in this field.

Below you’ll find 3 most fascinating Search Engine Optimization tips and tricks that will help you make the visibility of your site more prominent.  With the regular updates made by Google in its algorithm, it has really become important for the online business holders and SEO practitioners to update their SEO knowledgebase.

These below mentioned SEO tips and tricks will prove helpful in getting enhanced search result ranking, better visibility, improved traffic, and hence better business.

1. Create Reader Oriented Useful & Informative Content
In fact make it your and your site’s motto. Especially because, this is what Google wants the sites to do. And all the frequent updates that it makes in its algorithms is also for this very reason that it wants the websites to follow ‘visitors first’ approach.

So be careful in creating your content. Your content should be fresh and original and should be found useful and informative by the users. Stay away from content farming , do not use duplicate content at all if you don’t want to see the ranking of your site plummeting.

2. Image Alt Tags & Title Tags
Sadly, Alt Tags & Title Tags of the images are the most ignored by the webmasters while optimizing their sites.

Again, there are certain optimizers who consider both the terms to be the same and leave out one of these. Well, to clarify the entire thing, let’s check out what these terms stand for.  Technically speaking both are HTML attributes. However Image Alt Tags stand for the description of the image which appears in the place of the image when it takes a lot of time in loading, where as the Image Title Tags stand for the title of the image.

These are quite essential for over all personality of your site. So you need to assign proper Alt Tags and Title Tags to the images on your site. First of all, they need to be to the point, proper, and relevant to the images. Second, try placing your keyword but don’t be obsessed about it at all.

3. Image Optimization
Images on your site play quite an important role. First, they work like the dress you wear and if you wear them out of place you’re personality is all gone, similarly if you’ve chosen wrong images for your site, the personality of your site will be all gone. Second, they can be the main reason behind the long time taken by your page to load. So you’ll have to choose content –appropriate image and optimize it so that it doesn’t take too long in loading making your site visitors wait for long.

Sometimes you pick up any image that you find most relevant for your content, splendid to look at and place it on your site and do not check how heavy it is and how long it takes in loading. So it is best to use some free to use image editor like GIMP, Picnik, or Splashup and make your heavy picture light and proper sized, this will give better user experience.

These three search engine optimization tips and tricks will surely help you make your site perform better.