SEO Fundaments

So what are the fundaments concepts for SEO?

• Keywords - required to make your content relevant to searches
• Links - to indicate that your website is important to other users

Keywords

Search engines use bots (robots - automatic software programs) to crawl sites. They determine the content of a website from the keywords it contains. Thus they figure out what kind of traffic you want depending on the content keywords you use. As an example, in this series of articles, there will be a number of keywords such as search engine optimization, result pages, content, keywords, etc which make it obvious to the robot visiting that the articles are about SEO. Therefore, the site will be flagged as containing information about SEO. Search engines specialize in determining the topic from a minimal amount of keywords. Google Sets is an example of the kind of technology used to determine the topic of a website. Given a small amount of keywords, Google sets will idenitfy the topic and give you more keywords related to the keywords you gave it.

Therefore keywords are what you must think about when implementing your SEO strategy. Think of keywords which your target users are likely to use when they are searching for websites similar to yours. Then use these keywords in your content to make your pages relavant to search engine result pages. There are a few rules to observe, but we will come to that later.

Links to your site

Using keywords search engine's have a good idea of what your content is about. So what determines in which position your website will feature? Links to your website. The rule of thumb is that if a large number of other sites link to your site, then that means that your website contains important information relevant to the topic. The more incoming links you have, the better your search position will be. Also, if a popular and important site links to your site, this weighs more heavily to the importance of your site, than if ten "not important" site link to you. We will explain how a site is ranked as important and how ranking works later on.

Besides the relevance to search engines so that you are placed highly in the organic results of search engines, links to your websites (especially on high traffic sites), are an instant guarantee of traffic to your site. This is especially if you have relevant content, and thus you are recommended by linking websites.