The Very Basics Of SEO
If you have a website then you will most likely have figured out that the best way to get people to visit your site is to have people finding it through a Google search for which your website ranks number one. This isnt all that easy however because any search term that there are any number of genuine searches for is full of competition, even from people who dont offer that particular service, they just want the traffic so that they will click on one of the ads on their site pointing to someone else that offers the service. There is a lot of competition for any search term and so you have to know how to beat it.
So how do we get a site to the top? Well we dont know absolutely everything because the Google developers keep a lot of it secret so as to avoid anyone getting to the top for anything, however, from many years of trial and error as well as a very informative blog from Matt Cutts, Googles unofficial spokesperson, we can get a pretty good idea of what works and what doesnt.
There are over 100 on-page factors to take into account when designing your web pages to ensure that the search engines know what to rank them for, and these include the page title, repetition of keywords in the main page content (but obviously not to the point of keyword spam), alt text behind images, META tags etc. however there are far too many to cover in one article.
Backlinks are of course where the long-term challenge lies. These are links that point to your site and each link carries a certain amount of link juice depending on the value of the page the link is on and it is basically a matter of whoever has the most combined link juice from all of their backlinks will be first for a given search term.
Amount of link juice or value of the link, is determined by how Google rates the page that the link is from. Google PR is a rank from 0 to 10 given to every page that gives a fairly accurate indication of how much a link from a given page is worth. So basically, the more links you have from high PR sites, the higher your site will rank.