A memorable lecture on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Here goes my 3^rd blog post on “Anu’s Online Journal”. Specially, I would like to dedicate this blog post to Mr. Amitha who made the first move to carry out a web based lecture and to Mr. Suranga who conducted the lecture through web, from Sydney, Australia. Same as my colleagues in the Department, that was my first experience in a web based lecture. I’m glad that I was a part of it and I’m sure all my colleagues would agree with me. Anyway, on my very first web based lecture, I learnt about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Now I’m going to brief you what I’ve learnt.

“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results”

Well, that is how Wikipedia has defined SEO. But I’m quite sure that no one would ever digest that by reading that definition. That’s why I thought of briefing SEO from the things I’ve learnt in my first web based lecture.

In simple, SEO can be seen as a process of getting traffic for a particular website from the “organic” or “natural” ways on search engines. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results, where web pages are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. This is totally free even though people could advertise their own website by paying a certain amount to a search engine. Remember, it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results.

For an example: I typed “web pages” in Google search engine and below screen shot shows how the search results appeared. The area highlighted by the red colour rectangle shows the paid search results (pay per click - PPC) and the area highlighted by blue colour rectangle shows the organic or natural search results based on the number of visitors.

Well, I hope you would be interested to rank your website on the top of the search results without paying a single penny to anyone. Therefore, I would be telling you 5 easy ways to do that. Okay, let’s start.

1. Crawlability

Crawlability refers to the possiblility of a web site or its contents to be crawled or “indexed” by a search engine. Crawlability is also known as Spiderability and Indexability. A Crawler is a special type of program that visits web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a "spider" or a "bot." In order to make your website crawlable, you should make more meaningful URLs to all the pages in our website otherwise your web site would be ranked way below the first page of search results making it difficult to the users to visit.

2. Key Words

A keyword is any word or short phrase that describes a website or a page. Keywords aren't just keywords; every keyword, phrase and variation has its own audience. There may be a bigger audience for ‘black dresses’ rather than ‘black dress.’ If you want to attract more visitors to your website obviously you should use strong keywords in your website titles and website text. Therefore, you have to do a research to identify the key words that the visitors had used. You can use various types of tools available in World Wide Web to identify the main keywords used. “Google AdWords” a keyword finder that can be used to increase your website’s SEO.

3. Content Building

Content building can be considered as the heart of Digital Marketing. If the content of your website is irrelevant, nobody will ever visit again. In order to compete with other the websites which are having same content, you should find a way to make your website unique and outstanding. Your website’s home page which is also known as a landing page is the first thing that your potential customer sees after clicking on a link. Because you don’t have much time to convince them this is the right place, ensure there is an easy way to purchase your product or sign up for something as soon as possible. Make sure the design is clean, insightful and easy to navigate so that they can take action right away.

4. Add social media links

Almost all business now owns a social media account to keep in touch with customers and

potential customers. If your business has a Facebook page or other social media accounts, find out how many users are visiting your website through these social networks. Available in Google Analytics, the Network Referral report shows you how many people have visited your website through a social network. Is your Facebook audience visiting your website? If so, you are more likely to turn social network visitors into customers. An audience of loyal readers will link to and share your content naturally spreading positive word of mouth about your business or products. Building a social media presence would be only appropriate if the target audience of your business matches with those of social media communities.

5. Viral Content (Videos and Images)

Having viral videos or images with appropriate ALT tags will automatically boost the SEO of your website. ALT tags are very important because crawlers read only those and include them

in the search results. Most video content is invisible to Google’s search crawlers. Therefore, the best way to appear in Google’s search results is to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap which is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It can be submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools. You should make sure to optimize your video with important key phrases or keywords. Don't use complicated words or terminology that may not be common to the average person. Get on your social networks, look through your email contacts, write on your blogs, and get the hype going. Share your video with everyone, because if you have content worth sharing, it will continue to be shared to grow an expanding audience, and in turn develop more exposure for your brand or service.

There are numerous best practices for optimizing your website and be ranked in the top of search results. Feel free to share your tips on SEO in terms of comments. Well, that’s it for today’s post. Hope you’ll find this information useful :)