SEO Fundamentals: The Three Major Aspects of Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, or what is more commonly called SEO, is the science (or art?) of manipulating various aspects of a webpage so that it will rank high in the results page of a search engine. Search engines have different algorithms. That is, they work in different ways. However, the three most important sites that SEO practitioners focus on are Google, Yahoo and Technorati.

When we say that a website has a high search ranking, we mean that it goes on top of the search results for a given keyword. A keyword is a word or phrase that's the same thing that you would put inside a site's search field in order to get results.

The process may be a bit complicated at first glance, so much so that a lot of people who are new to this field cannot distinguish between SEO and voodoo. Because of that, let's discuss the basics.

There are three major aspects involved in Search Engine Optimization.

Content

This is the first thing that any SEO practitioner should take into careful consideration. A site ranks in a search engine only when it proves to be a strong candidate for a particular keyword. This means that the keyword that you want your site to rank on should be related to the actual content of your site.

Furthermore, there are some factors that you must also consider to make sure that your site has an optimal chance of ranking on top. One of the most important variables is your page's keyword density or the number of times that the keyword appears on your page. Ideally, the keyword density should be around 3-8 percent, which means that a 3-word keyword should appear at least thrice and at most four times on a single 300-word article.

Site structure

This is a bit on the technical side, but let me give you the basic idea. Google and other search engines index pages with the use of crawling spiders, or programs that scans a page so that it can be added in the web directory. By making a site's html structure friendly to spiders (i.e. search engine programs can easily read them) then you have a good chance of getting on top.

Site structure includes your html titles, headers, and various code-related stuff. The bottom-line is that even if you have the best content possible, if the site's coding is bad, then no one will be able to see your site when they search for something that your site talks about - and that's not what we want.

Backlinks

Backlinks are hyperlinks from other pages that lead to your target page. Many search engines consider the number of backlinks as an indicator of the popularity and authoritativeness of your sites. Ideally, the more backlinks your site has, the better.

However, sites that link to you should also have quality content so that the search engines will give them more weight. This is the same reason why many SEO practitioners fight tooth-and-nail to get backlinks for.edu or.gov sites, as these sites are considered as containing prime information - something that the search engines love.