UNDESRTANDING SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

This is the first thing everybody thinks about when they want to start a website or blog. To fully understand what it means, I am going to divide the phrase into two parts and explain them one after the other.

A “search engine” according to Wikipedia is a software system that is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web (a cool way of saying “the internet”).

Optimization in my view is the process of making or adjusting some aspects of a thing to work specifically with a particular product, software, process, etc.

Therefore Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of adjusting some aspects of your website or blog’s content so that search engines can easily and effectively find it (i.e. working specifically with software). 

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Using this method, your blog gets to be mentioned in search results without you paying for it (oh yes, you can pay for your website to come first in search results). This type of unpaid result is known as organic, earned or natural results.

LIST OF SEARCH ENGINES

Some search engines that are currently operational at the time of writing this post are as follows:

                               I.            Google.com

                             II.            Bing ( also known as live search or MSN search)

                          III.            Ask.com

                          IV.            Yahoo search

                            V.            Nate

                          VI.            Yandex (English)

                       VII.            Coc Coc (Vietnamese Search Engine)

                     VIII.            Qwant

 

How Do Search Engines Work?

When you type something in a search engine, it carries what you type, compares it against millions of web pages, images and other types of files that already exist on the World Wide Web that has the word(s) or phrase that you typed and gives you results which are ranked according to the most relevant to your search to the least relevant.

For example, if you type “getting a visa in USA” in a search engine, it will run it to get the web pages that has the exact phrase, the ones that has “Visa” and “USA” in them and other relevant combinations. After everything is done, it will display a number of results which starts from the most relevant to the least i.e the one pages that has the exact phrase (called key phrase) will come first followed by the ones that 4 of the words, then 3, (called key words) etc (you get the logic right?). 

The most amazing thing about it all is that all those processes happen at an unbelievable speed which is normally a fraction of a second (usually in milliseconds).

How Can I Utilize SEO For My Blog/Website?

Search engines have a very important role in getting organic traffic to a website or blog. Utilizing it however, is a problem that many people encounter since they are a variety of ways to do that. So how good can we utilize SEO?

•   Writing contents that have relevant keywords (words that people search for often)

• Using proven key phrases (phrases that people usually search for).

How Do I Know Relevant Keywords and phrases?

The answer to that question is just in one word, Research. Take for instance, you are starting a blog about fishing and you want people to read about it, you have to look for all (well, almost all) the words or the most popular words associated with fishing and find a way to put it on your website so that crawlers (robots that check the content of your website) can see them when they craw you blog. 

Read also: How to Decide What to Blog About

These crawlers check the content of your website, identify keywords/phrases, store them and serve your page when someone performs a search that has your phrase/words.

Look for the most common words and phrases that you think people will type in their search engines when they want to learn about fishing online. Common key phrases on fishing include;

•  How to fish

•  Learn how to fish

• Simples ways to fish

•   Low cost fishing

•  Teach yourself fishing, etc

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And common key words in that category are; fishing, hook, bait, etc. all those can help you make your blog discoverable. You can also target a specific region, city or country with phrases such as; fishing in New York, Fishing in Africa, etc.

The best way to research about a particular niche to get most relevant words or phrases that people search for the most is by using websites such as bing webmaster tools, ubersugest, semrush and others to check for most used words and phrases. Just type a word or phrase and they will give you their search analytics which include how many times people have searched for it and the related keywords. 

Also Read: BENEFITS OF BLOGGING

How Do I Use SEO Right?

It is important for you to know that optimizing your pages for search engines is good but you should take care not to use too many keywords that point to one thing on your website (using one keyword many times).

You can choose the synonyms of word and use to avoid been penalized by search engines especially if you are planning on using Google AdSense on your blog (blog monetization).