Introduction 

     Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the key to harnessing the power of Natural Search.
     Search Engines are major drivers of website traffic. 

●  SEO and Pay Per Click  (PPC) are two separate components of Search Engin Marketing  ( SEM) 
● SEO is focused on Organic Search 
● Organic Search rankings deliver trageted traffic.

The Internet is a very competitive environment, with literally billions of pages in existence.  So how does anyone find the page they're after? Web users find what they need primarily via search with the daily search volume numbers in the hundred millions.
So, if you want your website to generate a significant amount of traffic,  it needs to be listed on the major Search Engines and listed high up enough to be seen.
Statistics show that users are not likely to view listings beyond the first 30 result, with the top 6 ( above the fold) listings enjoying the lion's share of clicks. Beyond just traffic, ahigh ranking website is valuable for brand perception; web users often perceive Search Engine Results as an indicator of authority. 

    What Search Engines do:
●    Crewl the web ( via spiders)
●    Index web documents/ pages
●    Process users inputted queries
●    Serve results based on an ordered list of 
      Indexed pages ( rank)

    What SEO does :

●   Identifies key phrases to target,  based on search popularity or frequency of those 
     terms.
●  Creates accessible content to target those key phrases 
●   Builds links to lead Search Engine spider to the content of course , that's a
     simplification. But simple is a good start.

     Key Questions that SEO Needs to Answer :
●   Is the content relevant?
●   Can the Search Engines  spiders find the
     content?
●  Is the content accessible for the spiders
    once they've found it ?
●  Are our pages ranking ?
●  Are we driving traffic with these
    rankings ?


Creating Relevant Content:

     We're starting with content beacuse really, content is the most important part of your website. Any value that it adds needs to be added through good, relevant content. 

   We do this by identifying the key

  phrases to target:

   Keyword research tools allow you to get an indication of the popularity of vairous search terms. Additionally, you also need to check the level of competition for those terms. Armed with this information, you can now put together a comprehensive keyword strategy for your SEO campaign.
   
   Various Aspects of Keyword Research:

(1) Search volume -

This is an indication of the popularity of a search term.
Some useful Keyword tools include:

●    Keyword Discovery 
●    Wordtracker
●    SEO book keyword Tool
●    Digital Point
     
 There are lots out there.  Give a couple of them a try and decide which ones you like. A high- ranking on a popular term can deliver a lot of traffic but popular terms arealso likely to be more competitive. 

(2) Competitiveness -

For very competitive terms, where there are many websites vying for a rank , a strategic decision needs to be made regarding whether or not to target that term. More competitive terms are usually ser aside as part of a longer term SEO strategy,  with the less competitive terms being favoured in the short to medium term. An SEO strategist needs to make these decisions based on the ratio of searches to competitors and decide on its viability considering that particular term's propensity to convert.

(3) Propensity to convert-

Conversion remains the ultimate goal of any website. We want our users to take a certain course of action. When selecting key phrases to target, it is important to consider the likelihood of those terms leading to a Conversion. To what extent does the search term give us an insight into the mind of the searcher? At what stage of the buying cycle are they currently? By creating a bais towards phrases witha high conversion rate, we maximize the ratio of visitors to customers.  With your keyword strategy in place, you now know what kind of content your site needs.

  Some important points about content:


●   Use your content to create an obvious site theme.
●   For more competitive search terms, you'll need to create a hierarchical structure of supporting content, again  reinforcing the theme.
●   The better the quality of your content,the more leverage it will afford you for later on in the process. 
●   Remember,  Conversion is your website's ultimate goal.


 On Page Indicators of Relevance:


Meta Data:

●    Meta Keywords: 

Meta keywords were, a long tim ago, pretty much the BIG thing    in SEO. These days the Meta Data are far more peripheral in their importance.    Primarily they act as an indicator of a
webpage's theme. Keep them relevant to
the content on your page. 

●    Meta Description:

Many Search Engines use the meta description  paragraph at the descriptive snippet below your page link on the SERPs  (Search Engine Results Pages). Bearing  that in mind, these few lines of copy are perhaps among the most Important of your page. 
The more compelling, the more likely you 
are to get a good click through rate ( CTR)
Ultimately,  this has positive
repercussions for your rankings and
traffic stats.


   Title Tags:

●  Title Tags are the primary indicator of What your web page is about.  They are also important since they are displayed above your page description on the Search  Engine Results Pages. 


   Header Tags:

●  Header tags like <h1>, <h2> and <h3> are used to create a hierarchical page structure and act as and indicator of page theme. You should be using these to structure your page and use keywords to your chosen target phrase for that page.

  Keyword Density:

●   Keyword density is a measure of how many times your key phrases occurs on page in relation to the total number of words. The key here is to keep it reasonable. Keyword density is a indicator of relevance of your content to the targeted phrases. There's no magic percentage figure, but if you read the copy and if sounds overdone, then you need to reduce your keyword density.  


  Bolding/ Strong and Italics / Emphasis:

●   Bolding and italics serve a primary purpose as a means  to indicate bits of text that should be emphasized. In web copy, which is usually rapidly skimmed by users, bolding and, or italics make copy easier to read and understand. 
 Additionally,  they act qs an indicator of relevance for specific terms. So using  these techniques helps both users and Search Engines, which should always be  your aim.


     Alt Tags for Images:

●   Search Engine spiders can't read Images.So to help them along, we use alt tags to describe the Images. With Images that are relevant to the key phase,  we help improve relevance of our page when alt  tags are used properly.


   Important Accessibility Issues:

      First thing first.  Before worrying about
  any thing eles, make sure the housekeeping has been done . Clean up broken links, invaild HTML and other code ane minimize webpage file sizes.
      With the basics teken care of, you can start worrying about the rest

 1)  Clean URLs:


         Spiders don't like messy URLs - Your URL needs to be descriptive yet as brief and "Clean " as possible.  Dirty URLs are those which use too many daynamic parameters. These can be troublesome for Search Engine spiders, making it less likely that they will properly crawl your site.

 2)  Frames:


 ●    Frames are evil.Don't use them unless you really, need to and trust me, you don't need to. Fremes cause major issues for Search Engines, and as a general desing technique, they're bad news. The use of tables or CSS is far better.

 3)  Flash:


●    Flash websites are another no-no. Yes, they can look good, and are often visually impressive. Unfortunately through,  their content is largely invisible to Search engine spiders. Clever designers incorporate flash elements into their content-based web pages, creating a site that offers both the visual strengths of flash and the content bias of HTML  based pages.


4)  Feeding the Spiders- Links:


●   now that we've created a website that is full of relevant content and is searchengine friendly,  allowing the spiders to crawl and index, we need to make sure the spiders come crawling.
Spiders crawl pages that they find via a link from another page they were crawling. So if you want something crawled, make sure it's beinglinked to.

That's where link come in. Links play a huge role in SEO;

● Inbound links are perhaps the most significant single- factor influencing rankings.
● Outbound on page links help establish relevance to your page theme.
●  Interlinking of your pages, both via content and via your navigation, helps establish the relationships between your pages, bolstering the themes you are trying to establish.

  ●  Inbound Links:


      Search Engines want to provide users with results that are both relevant and important. While to some extent relevance can be gauged by on page factors, as mentioned above,it's what other "people " say about your site that is a real indicator of
What it's about. Inbound links are these "votes from other people " .Search Engines consider an inbound link as a vote for your site. Lots of votes from sites, which are in turn considered authoritative within your niche, create an indication of importance and relevance. 

  ●  Outbound Links:


     Links on a page provide some indication of the theme of that page. Lots of links out to relevant sites might be detrimental to your rankings. Links to relevant authority  sites can be useful to your visitors and help establish the page's relevance on the topic.

   ●  Interlinking:

●    Carefully considering Interlinking of pages is important for creating defined themes within your site. For important and competitive key phrases, it's useful to create content pages which link to support the pages you want to rank well.

5)  Sitemaps:


● An on-site sitemap is a web document,which lists all the pages you'd like the Search Engine spiders to find. This is a good method of getting a reasonably a deep  crawl on your site.

● An XML sitemap is a document submitted to a Search Engine, informing them of your content. it's a bit like a not  to the spider saying, "Dear spider, l've   put out some yummy new content for  you to enjoy. This is where you 'll find it".


      
6)  Link  Bulding:
      
      The process of generating inbound links
Is a highly specialized and involved practice, which we cannot explore here in too much detail. There are many different meansof building links. Links are not all created equal and as genral rule, the most valuable links are not easy to obtain- if they were, they'd not be as valuable aa they are.
     The most valuable links are those which come from authority sites,relevant to your targeted key phrases. Links can be gained by request, content exchange and a number of other initiated means.


Search Engine Marketing (SEM):

 SEM ( Search Engine Marketing) is tge process of gaining website traffic by purchasing ads on search engines. SEM is a borader term than SEO . SEO and SEM are not competing services.  SEO is considered a subset of SEM services. 

  Internet marketing method that focuses on purchasing ads which apper on the result pages of search engines such as Google. Many search engines offer ways for individuals or businesses to purchase ads, which typically appear above or to the right of the content on the Search results pages. Typically,the higher the fee one offers to pay for an ad, the higher the ad will appear on the page, depending upon how much competition there is to appear on that page. Depending upon the agreement, one may pay a flat for a given length of time, or may pay a given fee for each click that they receive to their ad.

  At Search Engine Land, we generally use SEM and/or " paid Search " to refer to paid listings, with the longer term of search marketing used to encompass both SEO and SEM. Below are some of the most common terms also used to refer to SEM activities :

     ●    Paid search ads

     ●    Paid search advertising 

     ●    PPC ( pay-per-click)

     ●    CPC ( cost-per-click)

     ●    CPM ( cost-per-thousand impressions)

Most search ads are sold on a CPC/ PPC basis, but some advertising options may also be sold on a CPM basis.