SEO for dummies

[RemedyCreative]

I'm currently interning for a sales company who are hoping to launch a new website, similiar to careerbuilder or monster, and it's my job to get traffic to the site. Spending money for advertising is not really any option, unless it is just completely fantastic and cheap. How can get the best of SEO on a tight budget? Any advice would be great!

[JorgeM]

You do not have to spend any money right away. You need to start thinking about how to design the new site. Incorporate these simple suggestions so that you get the "core" of the site done right the first time, before the web goes public and the search engines have at it. http://www.itgeared.com/articles/1225-how-to-make-your-website-seo-friendly/

[ibuzonebob]

Submit your site page to stumbleupon.com, and you will get lots of traffic.

[odeskavita]

First of all, I'll object that you called yourself a dummy. You are not required to refer to yourself with any such term, as everyone is required to start from somewhere. Now, getting back to your concern, since you are a complete beginner in this field, you must first understand the definition of SEO.

Well, Search Engine Optimization or SEO is generating traffic from organic, accessible, and natural search results under search engines. The primary aim of this optimization is to improve the ranking of your website on the search result page. People often tend to limit SEO only to Google, which is inappropriate. It is not limited to any particular search engine; we try to optimize the content for every search engine in general. The higher the ranking of your website, the more people it will reach and provide you with more conversions.

However, improving your ranking is more complex than the definition of this term. Various terms must be considered before we can say that your website has proper Search Engine Optimization. So, what all factors does it includes? Let's discuss them in brief:

(NOTE: These requirements keep on changing due to constant changes made to the algorithms of search engines.)

Crawling: When a user inserts a specific term in the search box of a particular search engine, a bot (often referred to as a crawler) tends to go through all the websites related to that input. The bot ensures that it provides its reader with only the most precise results, not junk files. The process is performed within microseconds; hence, we as humans cannot witness it. Many factors together make a website crawlable, but the most crucial among them are "keywords" and "sitemaps."

Keywords: Suppose you want to buy jeans, but you require search engines to help you decide which jeans you should buy in particular. So, what's the first thing you are going to do? Obviously, you will visit Google and type in "jeans buy online" or any other sentence you have in mind. The words you enter to get the desired results are known as keywords. A website owner must ensure to include the quality keyword in his content. This will ensure that his website is being displayed to a user searching for a product related to the website's niche.

Sitemap: A proper explanation of a sitemap will require a whole article; however, I will try to provide a basic idea. A sitemap could be understood as a guide map that provides the search engine bots with the ease of crawling. If you observe the sitemap in the background of the website, you will notice a sort of skeleton of that site.

Robot.txt: This feature informs the crawlers that they have the authority to access your site. Beginners often get confused that the element keeps the site from the reach of Google. This is not the case, the main purpose to implement it is to avoid overloading of a site. The feature that commands the crawlers which page to crawl and which to not, is called indexing.

Indexing: As I already told you in the above paragraph, indexing makes Google aware of all pages it should crawl. It generally includes two terms index (crawlable pages) and No-Index (non-crawlable pages).

HTTPS: Whenever you visit specific URLs, the prefix either includes "HTTP" or "HTTPS," so what does that extra "S" means? This indicates that the website you are accessing is safe to surf. How secure your website is, depends on various factors, like; the quality of coding of the website, proper utilization of robot.txt, the inclusion of Sitemaps, etc.

These were some of the basic terms of SEO that every beginner must be aware of. However, SEO is a very vast topic, and it is hard to cover everything in one go. Hence, I recommend you follow some of the experts present on the platform, like our Queen Dani. Don't shy away from dropping me a message if you face any confusion.