Basics about Optimization for Search Engines

Most bloggers quit updating their blogs because of low traffic, having a blog is not just putting new content or regular basis. Putting new content is only half of the job of having a successful blog, other part of job is to ensure your blog gets visitors. There are two types of traffic: paid and unpaid. Paid traffic comes trough advertising on other websites and is only useful if you can make more money with your blog or website than what you pay for advertising.

Unpaid or organic traffic comes from search engines and other web sites or blogs that have link to your blog/web site. This is the best traffic because you can be sure that people will only come to your blog if they are really interested in content rather than accidentally clicking on ads.

Most webmasters and bloggers aim for organic search engine traffic because of that. There is whole area in marketing that deals with website rankings in search engines and its called Search engine optimization or SEO.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is technique that is used to get the best available spot in SERP (Search engine Result Page) for chosen keyword. SEO involves many factors that must be improved to get higher rankings. It's lot harder to do SEO on blog because of limited access to code. There are many things that blogger or webmaster should watch for if they want to get good place in search engine results.

Better place in Search Engine = More Visitors.

SEO is divided in two sections - On page SEO
                               - Off page SEO

On page SEO involves any factors that can be changed on page or in the source code of page such as Meta tags, Right use of H1-H6 titles, Keyword density and so on, and Off page seo involves some factors that can be changed outside of page such as Number of backlinks your website or blog gets, Google PageRank etc.

Backliniks are links that lead to your blog/post/web site/web page from some other web site or blog. Backliniks can be DoFollow or NoFollow. DoFollow links pass PageRank from page that links to you and your Web site or Blog. No Follow backlinks are useless.

This is how NoFollow backlinks look like in HTML code:

<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">Link text</a>

This is how DoFollow backlinks look like in HTML code (only missing the rel="nofollow" attribute):

<a href="http://www.example.com/">Link text</a>

PageRank is algorithm that was developed by Larry Page and it shows importance of the web page by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. PageRank is shown with numbers that go from lowest 0 to highest 10(note that there are only few websites with PageRank 10 such as Facebook, Google.)

PageRank is only relevant for Google Search engine and it can be checked by installing Google Toolbar on your web browser and going to web site which PageRank you would like to know. Toolbar PageRank is updated once every three months or close to that while real internal PageRank of websites is updated on constantly.

Related articles

• DoFollow Link Glossary (bloggerstipsseotricks.blogspot.com)
• NoFollow Link Glossary (bloggerstipsseotricks.blogspot.com)