SEO For Newbies: A Brief Explanation
Do you get one of those cartoon halos full of question marks circling your forehead every time you see the word “SEO?” Do you get completely lost trying to figure it all out?
Don’t feel bad. I know I did and sometimes I still do. SEO can be very confusing and it’s not made any easier by the tons of conflicting information out there. You just want to post on your blog and have people show up to read it and maybe click on some ads or buy a few things. You weren’t planning to spend hours wading through complicated information that makes a college degree look like kindergarten.
That’s where I come in. My goal is to take all the information out there, condense it together and explain it to you in simple, easy terms, so you can do what you set out to do, build and promote your blog.
The first step in this process is to explain what SEO is and why it’s important to bother learning about it at all.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of making small changes to your blog that will improve its visibility on search engines and increase the amount of targeted traffic to your blog.
Why is this important to you? One reason… Readers! A blog without readers may as well be a journal in your nightstand. Bloggers need readers. Lots and lots of them. Every day.
You can get readers using other methods like commenting on forums, commenting on other blogs, submitting your blog to directories and using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, but search engine traffic still is and always will be extremely important.
Why? Because a reader who ends up on your blog through a search engine is not just a curiosity visit from someone who clicked your link somewhere and decided to take a look. They’re there because your blog matched something specific they were looking for and if you meet their expectations and provide the answers they seek, they’ll not only stick around, they’ll tell their friends about you, too.
Once you get past all the confusion, SEO isn’t really all that difficult and the results are worth the effort. Over the next few posts, we’ll go over SEO in more detail and learn some of the basics to get your blog noticed.
