Basic SEO is about common sense. The main purpose of search engine optimization is to make a website as search-engine-friendly as possible. Basic SEO doesn’t require specialized knowledge on search engine algorithms and programming. All you need to know is a basic understanding of how search engines work.
How Spiders work: Search engines collect data about a website by sending an electronic spider to the website. This spider copies the content into the search engine’s database. These are generally called as “bots”. These bots are designed to follow the links from one document to other.
Major search engines like Google and Yahoo claim to crawl as much data as US Library of Congress (approx. 150million items), every day.
Spiders read the content line by line from left to right, starting from top left hand corner. If the content is arranged in columns, they follow the the left hand column to its conclusion before moving to central and right hand columns. While crawling a page, if it encounters any links, it will record the links and send another bot to gather the data from this document.
Hence, web masters no longer need to submit the websites manually to search engines. The spiders are capable of finding every site, provided a link to your site exists somewhere on the web.
Now, once the search engine finds your site, making it crawl the rest of the pages is the first priority. Hence, it is important to provide clear paths to the spiders to help them crawl your entire site.
Hence, provide east to follow text links directed to your important pages at the bottom of each document. You should also direct a spider to a text based sitemap which lists every document in your website.
However, you can restrict the access of your spiders to few of your pages, in your robots.txt file.
Search engines are supposed to provide the most relevant data to users when a user enters certain key phrases. They decide the most relevant data from the documents in their databases by analyzing four most important points. Search engines consider 100’s of factors while determining the most relevant document. The most important of them are Titles, Description meta tag, good content and inbound links.
There is already so much of data available on web about the above 4 factors. I want to tell about something to beginners I don’t see many people talking about.
Guest posting: For beginners, guest posting is a good way to gain exposure, spread the brand as well as get some traffic to the site.
Most of the blog owners allow to a leave a link back to your site while submitting a guest post. This way, you are also building backlinks to your site.
To find guest posting opportunities in your niche, search in Google with the below search queries.
“guest posting” + [your niche]
“guest posting opportunity” + [your niche]
“submit guest post” + [your niche]
“write for us” + [your niche]
High- Profile Artice Marketing: Even though it is good to submit your articles to the regular article directories like goarticles.com etc…, you need to submit your articles to high profile sites that has a good page rank and traffic. Sites like associatedcontent.com, site-reference.com etc…
It is easy to find high profile sites in your niche.
a. Go to digg.com, choose an article in your niche, that has got atleast 100 diggs.
b. Copy the title of the article and do a search in Google.com with quotes.
c. Now, you find hundreds of high profile sites that may accept your articles too.