SEO can include black hat, grey hat, or white hat methods. You can include link building in your plans or try to gain more traffic organically. Anytime you work improving the performance of a website, you’re performing SEO. That means that every time you add a new blog post or update the metadata on your webpages, you are engaging in search engine optimization. While there are experts who have entire firms devoted to SEO, whether it’s done intentionally or accidentally, SEO is important. At the New Jersey Institute of Technology, elements of SEO are studied and analyzed every day. Since the invention of search engines, website owners have competed to appear in the top rankings. Here is a quick introduction to what SEO is and what it consists of.
Search Engines Explained
Believe it or not, but Google wasn’t always the head honcho in the search engine game. Yahoo was actually the predominant search engine company that provided search results to internet users in the 1990’s up to the early 2000’s. At any rate, websites can really only be found one of three ways; by having users type their addresses in directly, by way of internet search, and links found on other webpages. If you can get your website listed at the top of the search engine results for a popular keyword, you will get almost unlimited traffic. SEO practitioners work to improve search rankings so that their websites have higher visibility.
All About Web Links
A link is essentially nothing more than clickable text that leads to a different area of the web. If you link to different parts of your website so that users can easily navigate it, that is interlinking. When links to other web properties appear on your website, those are backlinks. The more links found throughout the internet that point back to your main website, the better your search engine rankings will be. If you write incredible articles, post interesting and relevant images, and regularly update your content, you’ll probably get quite a few backlinks over time.
Engaging in SEO
Aside from the steps taken to actually build up a website, everything else that you do to improve your website can be considered SEO. When you decide to change your website theme and change its branding, that’s SEO. Ask any master in computer science online graduate about the principles of SEO and you’ll receive a fairly similar answer. Improving upon, building up, and expanding your website is search engine optimization. There’s also off-site SEO, which requires you to have relationships with other website owners, but that is a different topic for a different day.
So, in short, if you do literally anything to make your website better, you’re already a budding master of search engine optimization. You can offer SEO services to other website owners, but only after you amass the right tools for analyzing your results. In addition, most SEO experts run well organized campaigns designed to meet a specific goal, such as to gain the number one spot in search engine rankings for a specific keyword.
