In my conversations with people over the past few months, the topic of SEO has come up more than a few times. There are many people who are interested in learning more and understanding SEO and what it is. Some of these people are the do it yourselfers who want to try and figure everything out on their own, instead of trusting a professional to do it, which is fine. Others are more or less trying to understand what they are paying for when they hire someone to do SEO for their site, and what is involved.  There are others still that are just curious and pride themselves in understanding the technology our current world revolves around.

So, what is SEO?
“SEO” stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is just a fancy way of defining how websites like Google, Yahoo, and others find and read your website. The easier and more logical your website is for, let’s say Google, to read and index, the better results you will get for relevant searches. So if you are going to make a website about flowers, you would want your website to be on page 1 of Google for things relevant to flowers. Maybe something like “Springtime Planting”. If you wrote about that on your flower website, you would certainly want it to be indexed on the first few pages of Google, optimally on page 1 right? That way, if I searched Springtime Planting, boom there’s your site. That in a nutshell is SEO.

What I just described (springtime planting) is a key phrase. These are one element of SEO. Keywords and phrases should be found within content, so that they can be indexed and referenced by search engines. It is also important to know that putting in “fake” keywords, or an overabundance of them, will result in poor resutls and a possible ban from search engines. So don’t try to cheat the SEO system because you will get burned.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, today I’m going to touch on the two most basic, and important elements of SEO. The <title> tag and the URL are probably some of the biggest factors that sway your website into the upper echelons of a particular category.

So, if you’re going to make a website about flowers, and you want “flowers” to be one of your main keywords, your URL should have that word in it. For example – www.mnflowergardens.com could be a choice, however – www.howtogarden.com would not be a good choice if you wanted “flowers” as a main keyword.

Another mainstay in current SEO practices is having your target keyword in your page <title> as well. This is actually referred to as the single most important element of a websites SEO, if your keyword isn’t in your title tag, there is little to no chance of getting that page on top of all the others out there.

I hope this has been a helpful introduction, watch for part 2 where I will introduce two more of the major factors in SEO with your website.