SEO: Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the acronym of Search Engine Optimization and means optimization for search engines .

SEO is a set of activities, techniques and procedures to improve the positioning of sites in search engines.

What is SEO?

The SEO allows you to place the pages of a site within the major search engines for certain keywords (keyword). If a site is in the top positions for the keywords related to your business, you have the opportunity to receive a huge amount of traffic without using the SEM (the Search Engine Marketing , which is the paid advertising in search engines).

If your site is the first result on  Google , You'll probably get a decent traffic for that keyword, that surely will generate contacts, phone calls and email. If your site was in tenth place, the total traffic would not be a tenth, but much less , because only the first result receives an average of 40-80% of the total clicks, depending on the type of SERP (AdWords, Maps , News, etc.), the business sector, etc.

Who is SEO?

 SEO is a complex and articulated, so over the years were born of the professionals who deal exclusively, or at least mainly, of this aspect of Web Marketing.

The SEO specialist is the one who deals with the cure optimization for search engines. The SEO specialist is tasked with improving steadily over time placements achieved by the strategic and functional site within the search engines.

The SEO can be:

Inhouse : the SEO consultant is hired as an employee of the company and by the side of the SEO site "from the inside"

Freelance / self : SEO is a natural person acting independently and staff for one or more customers. The freelance work continuously or performs consulting SEO.

Agency SEO : SEO is a legal person running one or more customers, through one or more employees of the SEO web agency

How is SEO in general

Do SEO means optimizing high number of technical aspects and content to make the website, and the various sub, appealing to the search engines, in order to get the best SEO positioning possible.

The activities of Search Engine Optimization is generally divided into two broad categories:

SEO Onpage

And that side of SEO which deals with the optimization of technical factors within the HTML code of the page, and then: optimization of metatags, content, images, microdata, keyword analysis, loading speed, etc.

SEO Offpage

SEO is the activity performed "off" from the page: the off-page activities most famous is the link building , namely the "construction" and the maintenance of backlinks to the site.

Analyze keyword

The quickest, and probably more efficient to conduct a ' market analysis on the keywords in the web world a best for your own business is a campaign with AdWords PPC short / medium duration (this is a matter for the SEM), to order to populate a database of keywords with the highest conversion rate to be exploited in organic SEO .

Another method equally useful for generic keyword analysis is the research tool keywords present onAdWords.Google.com . Through this tool, you can estimate the potential traffic the keyword (in addition to the unit cost for AdWords), can identify synonyms, variations of keywords and much more!

Finally, to find suggestions (especially for longtail) with respect to a given keyword, the instrument of most famous is definitely Ubersuggest.org .

Optimize your HTML pages (onpage)

The SEO optimization of the source code of the pages of a site is one of the determining factors for the success of an SEO project: wrong onpage optimization, although the offpage can be good, can result in a total disaster.

Optimize the code for the search engines the most famous ( Google, Bing and Yahoo ) is not easy: there are dozens, if not hundreds, of technical aspects can be optimized. In principle, however, the necessary elements to cure to obtain good results are:

• SEO optimization of meta tags . The meta tags are codes that should be inserted in the head section of the HTML pages and are responsible to provide more semantic information and techniques to search engine (but also the browser and the user). The most important meta tag is the title , which should contain the most important keywords of the page. It follows the meta description that is a small factor in ranking, but is also a conversion factor, as is shown in the SERP (search engine results in) and can then leverage the overall CTR of the page. Other important goal: robots (to manage the indexability pages or less) and keywords (although I do not use it anymore, it is useful to other search engines and various scripts that are to withdraw to automate queries and various other processes)
• Images . The images, although they are good for you, should always be used sparingly. Optimizing images side SEO means first of all pack them to reduce the size (medium-low quality .jpeg or .gif with color palette as low as possible if the image has no gradients). After optimizing the weight of the images, it is necessary to equip them of the necessary tags for search engines: the ' alt is the most important, as it is the alternative text if the image were inaccessible. Each image, if possible, should have the tag width and height that indicate the size (this arrangement speeds up page rendering and life those malformations due to dynamic loading of images).
• CSS and Javascript . CSS and Javascript files allow you to customize graphically the site and add very useful features for users. When possible, .css and .js files should be combined into one large file (in the case of many small files) and moved preferably in the footer of HTML, or, if you must, to the head-end.
• Indexing, canonical and duplicates . A source code level, it is important to pay attention to tags and codes useful (or harmful) compared to indexing. The meta robots can prevent indexing of unwanted pages. If the problem is to avoid indexing more pages duplicated (for example www.sito.it/pagina sito.it/pagina www.sito.it/pagina?parametro etc) the tag to use is the rel = canonical . Placing this tag in the head of the pages, you can "suggest" to Google what the final URL to be taken into account.
• Content . Treating the quality of content (not just semantics) is good practice to improve the quality of SEO pages.The most important content should be posted using a number of headings (h1, h2, h3, etc), tag formatting for emphasis (strong, b, em, etc.), semantic attributes (blockquote, abbr, etc.) and so on .

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