SEO basics; Starting from the ground

Many professionals or site owners don't understand the importance of learning SEO basics. Learning SEO basics is extremely beneficial for any website owner or a professional of related field. Even if you hire someone else for search engine optimization, at some point in future you will need at-least the basic know how of SEO. Importance of learning and implementing SEO basics was nicely put in words by Carolyn Shelby (Director of SEO, Chicago Tribune). "Skipping the basics and spending all your time and money on social and 'fancy stuff' is the same as skipping brushing your teeth and showering, but buying white strips and wearing expensive cologne," Shelby stated. By basics, she referred to SEO basics.

What are SEO Basics?

SEO basics is useful knowledge about search engines as well as your prospective visitors. You can use this knowledge to your benefit. How do search engine generate a list for any search query? How can you maintain balance between SEO and visitor's priorities? How famous search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, maintain ranking of websites?

Understanding the SEO basics can give you lots of benefits

Answers of above questions will give you a list of SEO basics. Once you have basic knowledge, you can innovate according to your needs.

Learning the SEO Basics!

Concept of SEO

Many people misuse the concept of SEO and they interpret SEO in wrong terms such as tricking the search engines. On the contrary, SEO is to provide a great experience to your visitors. Secondly, SEO maintains communication with search engines so they can get only relevant visitors to your site. A visitor looking for cake but landing on site of coffee shop will make no sense and certainly of no use to both sides.

How search engines rank a website?

Search engines rank websites by the factor of relevancy. Your foundation of SEO is content you offer on your website. More you remain relevant and on-topic, higher your site will be graded in search engines.

Performance, navigation and infrastructure of your site is very important. Is your site doing what it is supposed to do?And is it fast enough to handle traffic? Will visitor be at peace while navigating your site? Answer these questions and you will be able to make yourself a to-do check list. Links from sites with good reputation will grade you higher in the list.

User experience basically relates to all the factors above.

If you can increase your rating by good practices then your site can also be degraded due to some bad practices. Bad practices include misuse of keywords and buying links resulting in bad user experience. Overusing the keywords will certainly put of the search engines. Bad user experience can also result from various other practices such as site flooding with ads.

Some Good Practices

Following SEO basics are some good practices of professionals:

Make sure your website is optimized well enough for mobile computing due to steep increase in usage of internet on smart phones and tablet PC's. Social media has become the major source of advertisement and if you create links with your social media presence, you will definitely note an increase in relevant traffic. More relevant traffic means more conversions.

Some SEO basics are only handy if you are about to start your presence on WWW but learning them won’t hurt and they may help you in future. You will greatly benefit if your domain name includes your keyword. Use a sub directory rather than using a sub-domain, it will help search engine spiders.

If you have a basic know-how of SEO, you can try different things which may work for your website better rather than practicing what others are doing.