Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Fundamentals

I’m preparing a series of articles on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and this is the first one in the series.

These articles are a result of my observation, analysis, experience and study as a blogger for past one and a half years. I haven’t achieved anything significant as such in blogging but have managed to secure a PR of 3 for my blog and am getting nearly 200 hits per day at my internet blog. Through this series of articles I aim to explain my readers the concept of Search Engine Optimization. If you have a blog or website it will be useful to you. Else read it to understand how search engines work.

What is search engine optimization?

SEO is a million dollar industry on its own, with several individuals and companies full time into it offering wide range of SEO solutions.

Search Engine Optimization is all about making your blog website appear on top of search engine for a given search string. Technically, this involves understanding how search engines work and how they index the webpages for a given string, and then tweaking your website/blog accordingly so that your site gets indexed in top 10-20 results for a given search string.

What is the significance of SEO? What do I gain if my site appears in top 10?

SEO may not be of much significance for personal bloggers or non commercial websites who may not have any interest as to how many visitors visit your blog and how many of them come from search engines. But when you go commercial, SEO makes huge difference in your business.

To understand the importance of SEO better, we’ll take this example: You are running a financial company offering personal loan and have a website. Lot of people who need money search on internet for loans using strings like “personal loan”, “loan at very low interest”, “where do I get cheap loan”, “finance companies offering loan in Hyderabad” etc. Now, there’re thousands of financial institutions which offer loan and are your competitors in the business. They also have a website on net detailing their loan offers.

As an internet user when you search for something on net, you’ll check results in first page (top 10) with some interest. If you feel anyone of them suits your needs you click on it to check further. If you’re not happy with results in first page, you check few more pages and if no satisfactory results are found, you change the search strings and try again. You hardly go beyond top 30-50 results in any case, though search engine may list 10 million matches for your search.

If you haven’t got the clue, if you have a website and want to attract traffic, you need to be there in top to preferably or at least in top 50 else you’re not there. In other words, you’ll get lot of visitors to your site if your site appears in top 10 for a search string (and chances are high that many of these visits will get converted into business inquires and eventually into sales transaction, meaning lots of profit for your business). If you’re not there in top 50, you fail to gain any advantage of the power of internet and you have to depend mainly on conventional mechanisms to do business.

So, if some simple SEO strategies can help your position in search engine position and generate more business to you, why not try it out? That is the motive and business implication behind search engine optimization.

Read next part: Writing for Search engine vs writing for humans

Also read: Advantages of Live blogging an event * Live blogging tips * SEO for regional languages * Relevance of Blogging