Almost any business would love to be on the first page of Google for search results related to the products or services they provide. The purpose of this website is to teach you how to get your website ranked in Google, Yahoo, Bing, and many other search engines. If you follow all of these steps, you should be able to get your website to the first page of Google in a fairly short period of time. It is our goal to explain the steps involved in performing SEO in simple, easy to understand terms. Once you have this knowledge, you may still want to hire an SEO consultant or firm to actually perform the actual work involved in the SEO process (which can be time-consuming), but if you digest the material contained on this website, you will be able to make an educated decision about who to hire, what questions you should ask, and how much you should pay. So, without any further ado, let’s get to it!
We’ll begin with the basic concepts involved in performing SEO. We are assuming, of course, that you have a general idea what Search Engine Optimization is, and that you have some very basic understanding (and I mean very basic) of how websites are constructed. If you feel that you want to bring yourself up to speed on either of these subjects, fear not, we have written a preamble which will bring you right up to speed. If you’d like to brush up a bit, and get some basic information on how websites are constructed, and what SEO is, click here: What is a Website, Anyway?
If you feel comfortable with these basic concepts, then let’s get to it, begin to demystify the process, and answer the question: “How Does Search Engine Optimization Really Work?”
First of all, there are two major components to Search Engine Optimization:
- On Site Optimization – Actions performed on your website to increase your search engine ranking.
- Off Site Optimization – Actions performed elsewhere on the web (on other websites) that increase your website ranking.
On Site Optimization
On site optimization can be subdivded into 4 major categories:
1. Page Titles (Or Title Tags) – The title of a particular web page. Where is the page title? Well, it’s in a couple of places, but the one you can see right now is on the tab at the top of this page in your web browser. You can’t see the whole thing, because there’s only enough space for a few words. If you look at the tab at the top of this page, you will see that it says, “SEO in Los Angeles | Search En…” When this particular page shows up in Google searches, the page title is what you will see in bold, blue letters. When you click on the item that you are selecting from search results, the text you are clicking on is the page title of the webpage you are going to. We’ll be showing you how to change the titles of your web pages for SEO purposes.
2. Meta Tags – Meta tags are lines of code in your website that provide information about your site to search engines. There are two tags in common usage: The keywords tag, and the description tag. We’ll explain what these are for, and how to put them into your site. You can’t see these right now, but we’ll show you how to see the meta tags for this site later.
3. Content – The readable content of your website. You are reading the content of this website right now.
4. Anchor Text – This is a fancy way of saying links. When you see some text on a website that you can click on to go somewhere else, you are clicking on anchor text. Search engines place special emphasis on anchor text, so it’s pretty important.
Off Site Optimization
Off Site Optimization consists of one thing: Links to your website from other websites.
And guess what? That’s it.
We know what you’re thinking. It can’t be that easy. Well, actually it is. Almost anyone can perform their own search engine optimization.
Start learning the nuts and bolts of SEO right now by reading the next article: Title Tags and Meta Tags.
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WordPress right out of the box is pretty SEO friendly. However, you’ll want to do some basic things to customize your title tags and meta tags, as the ones that are automatically assigned may not be sufficient from an SEO standpoint. There are a lot of great plug ins for this, and I can’t speak to all of them, but the one I find the most straight-forward and user-friendly is the Yoast SEO Plug In. This plug in allows you to do a couple of things, one of the most important being allowing you to manually edit your title tag and meta tags. Let’s look at this for a moment.
