For an SEO the ultimate goal is to get listed above the fold on the first page of the search engines. This almost guarantees traffic – both targeted visitors and steady streams of hits. Of course, traffic is absolutely essential to a website. It provides your site with a community and depending on your site’s purpose, you could make money or build a lot of credibility only with traffic.
To get the rankings they are after SEOs devote their expertise to both on page and off page aspects of attracting the search engine’s attention. It is important that a website be able to be read by the search engine spiders in a way that highlights the site’s focus and main keywords. This is the on site optimization process in a nutshell. The off site process involved promoting the site to other sites to attract backlinks which pass authority and relevance back to the target site and encourage the search engines to rank it.
The most common onsite SEO practices revolve around the content and the source code. Of course the content has to contain the keywords that the site is about prominently enough to get noticed and ranked for those keywords. However, because the search engine spiders actually read a site via it’s source code there are many more coding hints that have to be given to the search engines to that they are sufficiently instructed about the site’s subject. Meta tags, Alt tags, heading tags and anchor text are just some of the methods used here.
Finally, once a site is properly constructed for on page and source code optimization factors an SEO will promote the site to other webmasters looking for anchor text backlinks containing the target keywords. Some of the backlinking happens naturally as other webmasters, bloggers and visitors link to the site on their own virtual real estate or via social bookmarking sites. But there is also a lot of networking that goes on behind the scenes to encourage other site owners, particularly those with authority sites, to link to a new site.
These SEO and linkbuilding fundamentals can be followed by experienced and new webmasters equally and there is a lot of information online to help all categories of web site creators. The key, of course, to any site’s success is its content. Good content will always trump amateur stuff because it will generate its own authority and interst. Still, it’s important to know the SEO and linkbuilding fundamentals that will help to promote your site to search engine spiders and get you listed and ranked in the search engines.
James Spacey is a blogger and affiliate marketer from Australia. For more free quality information about how to make money online visit James at http://www.makemoneyonline4idiots.com today.
