SEO as a form of Web Marketing – Tips

Search Engine Optimization is a part of web site marketing, aiming to achieve the best results from search engines. Optimizing for search helps to define the target and focus the web content as well as internal structures that provide maximum exposure for search engines.

Nowadays, most people asking for SEO rush into what they think is the best SEO strategy: getting inbound links (IBLs), getting over the most important aspects of SEO, which is on page optimization. If you are familiar with database queries (SQL) you will easier understand how a SE respond to a query. The issue on stake is data retrieval, given the nature of uncontrolled heterogeneous documents on the web. When a user type a query into a search engine, the database is scanned for pages that may be relevant to that query. You may see it as a multiple join query on tables like ‘doc index’,  a pre-sorted data retrieved from index, PageRank, lexicon, each table being on its turn filled with sorted data. So, even if we are told by Google that internal PageRank is one of approximately 200 factors, the Google SE anatomy shows us a more or less 20% weight of PR.

But this leads us to the importance of relevancy of a term within a web document and underscores the magnitude of  on page SEO. So, let’s have a recapitulation of basic SEO principles:

1. The best timing for SEO is at the same time with the web site design;
2. On page factors are residing in head and body of the web page;
3. Each page should focus on 1 -3 keyword phrases. This allow the web site to achieve a high relevance, very important factor, as I mentioned  previously – each page on site should be about a distinct topic;
4. All on page factors are equally important;
5. Usability and accessibility are always important SEO guidelines; optimize for users, not for SEs;
6. HTML elements have no negative impact on SEO, except special elements, like anchors, alt tags or whatever element  containing major errors;
7. Don’t try to game search engines, it won’t work. Black hat seo is just a term invented for short time frauds, as they cannot last long;
8. It is important to repeat certain expression, but not abuse them, as may lead to keyword stuffing suspicion, which is penalized on SEs;
9. Link effectively, not abundantly – avoid JavaScript links and HTML links with special attributes;
10.  Use on page factors wisely, as title, meta tags, headings, body and footer area, bold keywords, alt attributes and remember that page structure is also important. Use a sitemap, robots txt, avoid “bad neighborhood”, don’t place too many links on one page and use a different name for “home” anchor text (usually your domain name).

OK, be sure that if you use wisely all these factors, it would be one of the most effective marketing strategies with the highest ROI of all methods. Questions?  Don’t hesitate to ask!

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