Introduction to Search Engine Optimization

Website / Business name: “Heavenly Desserts”
Domain name: www.heavenlydesserts.com
Focus: cupcakes, cakes, cookies, pies, gelato
Size: small, 100 pages

Gone are the days where building a website is just about making it the flashiest. Now an essential aspect to consider when creating a website is Search Engine Optimization. Search engine optimization, known for short as SEO, is a process of making many small modifications to a site in order to improve the traffic to your webpage coming directly from online search results.

There are ways to increase web traffic through paid online marketing, but this document specifically discusses Organic Searches or Unpaid Search Results. A combination of these small changes, done correctly, can greatly impact your user’s experience and your webpage’s rankings in search results. Most of the topics discussed may already be familiar to you, as they have become vital to any webpage. However, you may not be using these tactics to their full potential. The best practices discussed below will make it easier for search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing to catalog the content on your page, otherwise known as crawling and indexing.

Please NOTE: This document is meant to be a guide. Overuse of search engine optimization tactics can overwhelm your site visitors and cause the site to be non-user friendly. You’ll need to find the optimal use of these tactics for your page, while keeping your customers in mind rather than focusing solely on search engine visibility.

Sources for this article and some of the articles within the Learn SEO Category on this website were gathered from Google Webmaster Central.

In order to make this guide easy to follow, below is some key background information for a made up website that will be used as an example throughout: