SEO For Beginners - Where To Start

No matter what type of business or market your involved with, if it's on the internet then you need traffic to your content. One way to generate traffic is to rank # 1 on the google search engine for your target keyword. The method used to accomplish this is called SEO or Search Engine Optimization. If your a beginner just think of it in these simple terms. The web page your trying to rank for will need to meet certain criteria so google understand's exactly what it's about. The other thing you'll need to consider is showing google just how relevant and popular that web page is to other people for your target keyword. That's SEO in it's most basic terms.

First try to understand what search engines do. Take Goggle for example. You type in Google.com in your web address bar and you'll arrive to their homepage. On the homepage is just a box basically. When you want to know about something you type a word or phrase to find that information. Google will return a list of results relevant to what you want to know. How does google find those results? They have a program called a web crawler that studies web pages for clues as to what each an every page on the internet is about. A web crawler will look at the words in the title, description, tags, body of text, and much more just to figure out which keywords that page should show up for. Your job is to help Google understand what your page is all about. This is called on-site optimization. Of course you will find more technical explanations, terms and techniques. But my goal is to keep things accurately simple.

Behind every keyword is a desired result. If someone type's in the word dog, the desired result is extremely obvious, that person wants information about a dog. If someone type's in the word dog catchers, that person most likely desires to have a stray animal removed from their neighborhood. If someone types in low calorie dog food, that person most likely is seeking to make a purchase for their overweight pet. At the very beginning you should develop an intimate connection as to what results someone would want when they do a search for a keyword.

Keywords are searched a different number of times each day. Knowing how many times a keyword is searched will give you an idea how large a problem is, or how popular something is. For example the word music was searched 277 million times globally last month according to the popular keyword tool Google provides for users. I'll go into the keyword research tool in a later article. But this information tells you how enormously popular music is. Each keyword has this type of history to it. This is called keyword traffic.

Keywords have competition. Competition will come from all the other web pages on the internet with your target keyword on them. When you type in your keyword on a search engine you'll notice that underneath the search box is a number. That number represents the total number of web pages with your target keyword in them. Take for example the keyword music. There are over 1 billion web pages on the internet with the word music in them. As a marketer the keyword music has great traffic but there are just too many competing pages out there. As a marketer you'll also want to focus primarily on the web page at the number one position because that's where you want to be. But already you see how important understanding competition comes into play for each keyword.

Keywords come in all shapes and sizes. A keyword could be just a single word or a group of words. For example, black graphic t-shirts is a keyword. Generally speaking the more words within a keyword the more niche related that keyword becomes. Example here would be the keyword shirt. If you were to add more specific search terms to shirt you might end up with "used button down shirts", or "black t-shirts on sale". Although the number of people searching for terms like these will be smaller or less traffic, you get a specific sense as to the result they are looking for.

This is where the opportunity in keywords stands out. The seo marketing industry as a whole changes rapidly and is dense with competition. But keep in mind that this is simply the technology behind how search engines rank web pages for keywords. A solid foundation and understanding of what people truly want behind those keywords will allow you to tailor content, services, and products to the needs of searchers.

Your soon on your way to developing simple seo techniques that will help you rank high for words with low competition.

There is much more to keywords and SEO that I will share with you in future articles. But for the purpose of introducing you to a simple version of SEO the above should give you a great foundation as to the scope of where to start with such a massive subject. Thank you so much for taking the time to read my ideas, more to come soon.