SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. While this might sound like a kind of cool voodoo, this is little more than setting out your content in a way that search engines can understand what its value is and to which search terms it relates.
In other words, SEO is well written, good quality content. Or, if you happen to be evil, something that pretends to be.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine. SEO refers to the improvement of unpaid results (known as “natural” or “organic” results), and excludes the purchase of paid placement.
Search engine optimization, Wikipedia
SEO Basics
Very, very briefly we will take a look at the basics of SEO. As we expand the guide, we will add subsections which will take a deeper and more detailed look at various aspects of SEO.
SEO Keywords
In SEO, keywords refer to the words or phrases that you would like your content to show up for. In terms of writing quality content, your keyword is the topic your post or page is about.
Finding good keywords to target is part art and part science; it is known as keyword research.
Keyword research is a practice search engine optimization (SEO) professionals use to find and research alternative search terms that people enter into search engines while looking for a similar subject. Search engine optimization professionals research additional keywords, which they use to achieve better rankings in search engines. Once they find a niche keyword, they expand on it to find similar keywords. Keyword suggestion tools usually aid the process, like the Google Ads Keyword Planner, which offers a thesaurus and alternative keyword suggestions or by looking into Google Suggest.
Keyword research, Wikipedia
Long-tail keywords
The concept of the long tail is that a lot of keywords have very little traffic in and of themselves but there are so many like that which have low competition that you should be able to target many low traffic keywords whose combined traffic is significantly greater than the more competitive keywords.
Yoast (whose plugin is available for all Author Buzz blogs) has a dedicated guide to long-tail keyword planning.
For more on long-tail (and short-tail) SEO, see our page about keywords.
On-Page Optimisation
A lot of SEO is focused on what you can do on the page that you are optimising. For example, correctly using heading tags (h1, h2, h3 etc.), using semantically meaningful markup, and writing copy with a reasonable keyword density (how often the keyword occurs in the text).
Most on-page optimisation is simply a combination of good design, quality writing, and decent presentation.
URL Structure
Another aspect that is generally considered important is to have URLs that indicated the subject of the page. We have a post dealing with just that topic: