SEO BasicsBeginners Level

What is SEO?

• SEO is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results.• SEO is simply a matter of making sure your site is structured in a way

that search engines understand.• Search engine optimization is a methodology of strategies,

techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (SERP) -- including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.

Why does my website need SEO?

• The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines.

• Social media and other types of traffic can generate visits to your website, search engines are the primary method of navigation for most Internet users.

• Search engines are unique in that they provide targeted traffic—people looking for what you offer.

• Targeted traffic to a website can provide publicity, revenue, and exposure like no other channel of marketing.

Why can't the search engines figure out my website without SEO?

• Search engines are smart, but they still need help.• Right SEO can net you thousands of visitors and increased attention,

the wrong moves can hide or bury your site deep in the search results where visibility is minimal.

Can I do SEO myself?• The world of SEO is complex, but most people can easily understand

the basics.• Depending on your time commitment, your willingness to learn, and

the complexity of your website(s).

An Ideally Optimized Web Page• Be hyper-relevant to a specific topic (usually a product or single object)

• Include subject in title tag• Include subject in URL• Include subject in image alt text• Specify subject several times throughout text content

• Provide unique content about a given subject• Link back to its category page• Link back to its subcategory page (If applicable)• Link back to its homepage (normally accomplished with an image link showing the

website logo on the top left of a page)

How Search Engines Operate

• Search engines have two major functions:

• Crawling and IndexingCrawling and indexing the billions of documents, pages, files, news, videos,

and media on the World Wide Web.

• Providing AnswersProviding answers to user queries, most frequently through lists of relevant

pages that they've retrieved and ranked for relevancy.

Crawling and Indexing

• The link structure of the web serves to bind all of the pages together.• Search engines decipher the code from them and store selected

pieces in massive databases, to be recalled later when needed for a search query. • These monstrous storage facilities hold thousands of machines

processing large quantities of information very quickly.

Providing Answers

• When a person performs an online search• first, it returns only those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher's

query (relevance);• second, it ranks those results according to the popularity of the websites

serving the information (popularity).

• Search engines typically assume that the more popular a site, page, or document, the more valuable the information it contains must be.

Thank you