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| Search Engine Optimization |
SEO stands for ''search engine optimization''. It is the process of getting traffic from the "free", "organic", "editorial" or "natural" search results on search engines.
All major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo have primary search results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads.
What Should You Learn?
# Relevance
One of the most important factors when it comes to SEO is relevance. The search engines don’t only want to see that you’re using specific keywords but it also wants to see how relevant your content is when it comes to specific search queries.
In order to do this, search engines don’t only look at the text on your website itself. They also look at:
- How your website is structured
- What keywords are used within your URL
- How your page is formatted
- What keywords are in the headline that are also found within the content of that given page
# Backlink
When it comes to SEO, keep in mind that it is constantly changing. As a result, the techniques that worked last month might get you penalized this month.
However, one thing that all search engines will rely upon is authority AKA, the number of backlinks that you have. Therefore, contrary to what you might hear, SEO still relies heavily on links.
Search engines will determine just how credible and authoritative a website’s content is simply by calculating the number of inbound links that you have from other websites. (By the way, an inbound link is a link pointing to your site from a 3rd party site.)
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the more backlinks you have the higher rankings you will get.
Search engines also look at how authoritative these other websites are linking to you. Meaning a link coming from the New York Times is a lot more authoritative than one coming from a little website that was created a few days ago.
There are other components, such as what anchor text is being used (this is the text inside the a tag) to link to your website and how old your domain is.
# Technology
Even if you have perfect site content, URLs, and strong inbound links —your internal structure is important.
Think about it: in order for Google to crawl your site and index it properly, it has to have semantic HTML.
# Meta Tags
Meta tags are nothing more than HTML markup tags that give search engines more information about a web page.
However, this information is not visible to viewers of the site. Instead, it is written to assist search engines in understanding a web page.
Meta tags are placed inside the head element in a web page and contain a name and content attributes. For example, the meta tag for this post that you reading could be: meta name="description" content="SEO for programmers".
Meta tags are one of the most important aspects on a web page because they give search engines a short description about the page. In addition to the description meta tag, there is a meta robots tag and the title tag.
# Schema Markup
Schema markup is one of those SEO techniques that you will seldom hear about, but it can be one of the most effective techniques for getting quality traffic.
Schema markup is code you can put in your website’s HTML that will help the search engines understand exactly what the information on your website means. It then helps the search engines to return more useful results to the user.
