Basics of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO, or search engine optimization, involves improving the volume of quality of traffic to your website from search engines like Google+, Yahoo and many others.

White Hat SEO refers to website optimization strategies performed in accordance with the best practices recommended by search engines such as Google, Bing, and others. Done in accordance with ethical standards that are acceptable to these search engines. Natural and penalty risk-free SEO strategies are put in place.

If you try to manipulate search rankings, your website SEO strategy can be identified as Black Hat SEO. Search engines hate Black Hat SEO and they will penalize your website by lowering its ranking, remove it from their index or even bury it deep down in search results page. To stay safe from any Google penalty, you should restrict your SEO effort to those in conformity with Google Webmasters guidelines.

White Hat SEO Strategies

Sitemaps: Google spider need to know where to find your web content. Sitemaps provide the search spiders the index and directions to the content and webpages on your site. Link the URL address to your sitemap in the footer or header of your website pages. Sitemaps direct search engine spiders to crawl and index all pages of your site more efficiently and effectively, which helps in bringing better results from your SEO efforts.

Keywords: Inclusion of proper keywords is also critical because it captures the interest of the reader. You should make sure that the keyword phrases are mentioned in the title, meta description and keywords of the webpages.

Page Optimization: Focusing on optimizing each page individually for dedicated keyword phrases increases the chances of business being ranked higher.

Optimize Images: Media optimization makes sure that videos and images on your site are optimized to have a small file size so that the pages load faster and helps in improving user usability and engagement with your website. Optimization of the keyword in the properties of the files also can boost the page’s keyword relevancy and SEO value. You should also consider geo-tagging images for local SEO.

Website Directories: To improve local rankings and off-page SEO, get social and have your site is listed on various other websites and directories to build domain authority. This helps improve the ranking potential of your site, stems from the citations and backlinks from which you can earn from other website listings. To help in rank boosting, use of services / tools such as Whitespark, Bright Local and Yext tools to find opportunities to get listed on safe SEO-friendly websites is important.

Webpage Schema: Schema Markup for optimal SEO friendliness helps in communicating your sites content more comprehensively and efficiently to search engines and I turn schema can improve the Google search engine of your site listing by generating rich snippets at the same time helping to boost your SEO endeavours. You can learn more about it on Schema.org.

Local Citations: Citations are equally important for local SEO. It is simply mentioning of the name, address, location and even phone number of the business. Google crawls the citations mentioned and compares the information given with other citations found about your business on other websites, for example, Yelp.

Though local citations might not be very important for food blogs, it is crucial for business websites. When your food blog is also providing any service, say SEO services in San Diego, you must put effort in building local citations through niche directories, local directories, industry associations, trade websites, etc.

Social Media: Start embracing social media as part of your SEO strategy. For example, Google Pins, Facebook Likes and Tweets have become a hot topic in the SEO community.

SEO is a touchy subject because Google frowns upon keyword stuffing and manual link building. If more sketchy forms of black-hat SEO tricks are used for your website, you risk having your website de-indexed by Google search engines. It is essential to ensure your citation is completely accurate and consistent on all pages of your websites and other external web properties.