The definition SEO or Search Engine Optimization according to Wikipedia is “the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords (a set of words).

During the last 6-7 years I met many people who thought that inserting desired keywords into the Title, Description and Keywords tag is good enough for top ranking. Even today many think the same. To some extend it may be true, but not enough.

Let’s take an example:

Try searching Google for “search engine optimization”. What to you see? Did you notice how many competitors are there for this keyword? There are millions. I guess at least half of them would have inserted the keyword in their Title, Description and Keywords tag. But how many got to top 10?

Common sense says there is more to SEO process than just stuffing keywords in your webpage tags.

What are they?

There are many factors and it’s impossible to write them all in one single page, though I shall try to give you some basic idea.

SEO was simple when search engines were evolving. I am talking about 1998-2003. Then on November 2003 Google changed the way it ranked the pages, and the rest of the search engines followed too. This changed algorithm is known as the “Florida Update” (unofficial name given by webmasters). From this day SEO became hard.

Prior to November 2003 two things were essential to get a high search engine ranking.

1) Keywords in Title, Description and Keywords tags.
2) Keywords stuffing 10-12 times in content of the page.

That’s it. Wait for a few days and wow you get your pages on top ranks. Well no more!

Keywords in Title, Description and Keywords tags are important to some extend even today. Though, I have my doubts on keywords stuffing in content of the page. These search engines are so smart that they will know that you have actually “stuffed” keywords in your page, and may not rank your page well for that keyword.

Insert the keywords if it’s really required in the content. You will gain nothing by stuffing keywords.

Another important factor is how many websites link to your site. This is known as “Link Popularity”. Search engines especially Google gives a lot of importance on link popularity. Google’s logic is that if a lot of sites have linked to a particular site, it must be of some value to the visitors, and therefore the site deserves a good rank.

Link popularity itself is a huge topic and I will discuss it some other day.

Make sure your site does not have any broken link. A broken link is a link pointing to a page that does not exist. These are also known as dead links and the search engines hate them.

Your websites content is important too. Imagine a site with hundreds of incoming links but little content. Do you think the search engines will rank the page well? The content has to be meaningful and offer some value to the visitor.

These are some basic points to rank well in the search engines.

Most importantly – remember to be honest and informative – the rest will fall in place automatically.