Okay so my past articles were a bit for giving some simple picture about earning money online. Now I want to start slowly to introduce you to the SEO game, as still in the 2019 it is relevant and will be relevant as long as people are searching for things on the internet.
What is SEO in the first place?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and as the name implies it helps you optimize your website for search engines. But what does this mean exactly? Simply put it in this way when you use a search engine such as Google, most popular one, or if you are type of guy that uses Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo etc. and when you type in something to search for the results that will be shown in order on pages rightly depends on how good of an SEO you’ve done on your website. Mainly there are things that are common for these search engines but if you want your website to be ranked on the particular search engines you might need to optimize further as they all have a bit different metrics but main things, as I have stated apply for all of them.
What are search engines?
Search engines are how people are able to find other websites on the internet. There is a known saying if people can’t find you on google: your website does not exist. This statement is so true because mainly how people are going to find your website is that if they have searched for the specific keyword and it got shown on the search engine or yet if somebody linked to your website from their website or social media links.
At their core search engines operated these bots, so called “spiders” that crawl the web in search for new websites and for existing ones. Crawling refers to search engines sending bots to your website in order to keep up to date with your website, usually what they do is they check for any possible link that they can find to any resource being it your other pages, image file etc. They crawl the websites and try to gather as much data as they can so that they apply their metrics and thus be able to determine how good is your website and put it in their database. So when you are searching on google for instance you are actually sending the request to one of the google servers that then go through its database and lookup for websites and put them in order accordingly by what it sees as the best to the lowest quality website.
The good thing is that by knowing SEO you can optimize your website to rank faster. Sad news is that because there are a lot of websites nowadays with many newer showing up every minute it will take you months if not years to rank among the first websites depending on the area and niche and keywords that you want to rank your website in. So just be patient, know your outcome and be sure to tweak the things and track and record your progress to be able to evaluate what you can tweak about your website in the future for it to be shown and ranked well by search engines. That said nobody knows the straight path to be able to rank your website the best way. Rather we have many clues of what others have tested and what is known to the public about few metrics. Because if we all knew all the things necessary to rank as the number one, there won’t be much fun in the game and how would we ever expect to get the best results while searching for the particular website?
Hopefully I will be able to shed more light onto SEO and help you get started with ranking your website better and thus attracting more traffic to your website. Because remember more traffic equals to more money, the more people you attract the more revenue you can earn from ads, affiliate links or yet the more sales you can get in case that you have some product to sell.
Why you want to consider applying SEO tactics and rank higher on search engines?
Simply put it this way, you have mostly 2 options out there to be found on the internet the paid way, to buy the traffic via advertisements or the way to drive traffic via organic sources and this can be achieved by doing proper SEO on your website. Yes, still if you don’t know SEO and if it is easier you might pay somebody to do it or invest your time so it’s not free traffic but still the more ways you let others to find your website online the better it is for you.
There are few things that you have to setup in order to help the search engines to get around your website
Robots.txt: this is a simple txt file where you can allow and disallow robots to view certain content on your website, if they follow this txt file of course. Mainly you can even set other privileges to specific bots like how you want them to handle your website when they crawl it.
Sitemap XML: this is another type of file that is desirable to have on your page. Basically at its core sitemaps contains all links that are relevant to your website and by doing this you help search engines to index your webpage fully and you make their life and your life easier as well. Maybe sometimes you have some pages that for whatever reason don’t have links to them provided and because of this, crawlers were unable to find them, in this case sitemaps are really useful as they help search engine know there is an extra page that needs to be indexed well. There are free tools that can generate the basic xml for your website so you don’t really need to know what is XML and how to write these sitemaps manually.
Wrapping up…
If you are interested in starting ASAP to learn about the SEO you can check the google personal guide that will get you started, but know that it is not enough for your website to get to the top by just following this guide: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en
Of course depending on the type of website you have there will be different kind of approach to the SEO that you want to do. For instance, if you are using wordpress, a popular CMS – Content Management System, for your website then there are tons of plugins that will help you with this. While on the other hand if you have your website written from starch you might want to approach changing the things on the website without the plugins, which could sound hard at first.
There are also a lot of free tools such as seositecheckup.com that can give you an insight about general things with your webpage SEO. Of course there are paid tools/services as well and there is a reason why they have a paid option as usually they offer more in depth analysis etc. depending on the type of tool and service that you choose from.
Stay tuned for the more guides that I am going to write about SEO. As this is a first post it has some really good intro for you to understand what SEO is and why you need it.
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thanks