How search engine optimization works

Search engine optimization works by optimizing your site for search engines in such a way that it brings targeted traffic to your site. By this, we mean Internet users who are actually looking for your products or services. Visits from people who are not actually looking for your products or services may increase the number of hits your site gets but is not likely to achieve conversion. Therefore, search engine optimization attempts to bring the right kind of Internet users or potential customers to your site. These users are individuals who have used a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or MSN to find the specific kind of products or services that you offer. In basic terms, SEO does this by attempting to match key aspects of your page content with the kinds of phrases that people type into search engines when looking for something on the

A Basic Internet Search

Let us say, for example, that you are an Internet user who is looking to buy a used car online. Besides going to an online auction site such as eBay, you are likely to start your search for a car by going to the home page of a search engine and typing relevant terms into the search box. This is known as a search query. Here are some of phrases we might type into search engines when looking for a used car. Used cars buy a used car online second hand cars Second hand Automobiles These collections of words are known as search terms or keyword phrases or key phrases. A key phrase is a collection of words that people actually type into search engines when searching for products or services. As Internet users are becoming more sophisticated, they now tend to string keywords together into key phrases as this qualifies their searches and produces more specific results. Of course, the above terms are not the only phrases that people are likely to use when searching for a car
online, but they do show you the kind of words people might actually type into search engines. Note that searches are not case sensitive, so it doesn‟t matter if people use capitals in their search terms or not. When we enter one of the above terms into a major search engine, we are presented with a list of results that the search engine believes to be relevant to the term searched for. For example, if we type buy a used car online into Google, we are presented with the following page of results-

Our first task is a very simple one aimed at offering you a chance to try out the above principles.

1.Navigate to the home page of a major search engine like Google, Yahoo, or Bing

2. Pretend that you are buying flowers for a partner online. Make a short list.

3. of the key phrases you might use to search for this product.

4. Enter each of your key phrases in turn into the search engine.

5. For each key phrase you enter, look at the leading results, and note the frequency of words that correspond with the phrases you used.

6. Ask yourself the following question: „why did the sites returned rank for my key phrases? In order to introduce you to the methods explored later in this course, the following material is a basic primer to optimizing your site. In later units of this course, we will take a more in-depth look at the techniques used by SEO professionals. For convenience, we will divide this primer into two parts. Firstly we will look at what are known as on-page factors, or the actual code and content of individual web pages. Secondly, we will look at off-page factors, or factors that affect the ranking off individual web pages which are not determined by the actual code of your web pages. On Page Factors Bearing in mind that search engines read the textual content of WebPages, it is particularly important that we optimize this content to ensure maximum visibility for our products and services. Every web page has a number of „hotspots‟ or points that are considered particularly important by search engines when they try to determine the relevance of that.