In this post, I’ll discuss some basic SEO techniques and how to apply them.

Understanding the Jargon

The first thing we need to define is SEO itself. We already know what  the acronym stands for, but what does it mean? According to the SEOmoz dictionary, SEO is “the process of increasing the number of visitors to a web site by achieving high rank in the search results of a search engine.” So when you perform SEO on a site, you are making sure that when someone types in relevant keywords into Google (or other search engines), the site will appear in the results. Ideally it should appear within the first page or results, or even as the first result. Here are some other common SEO terms, together with definitions:

• Keyword: The word or phrase that users enter into search engines.
• Crawlers, bots and spiders: These are the names given to the programs that search engines use to browse, analyze, and index your site.
• Search volume: This is the number of people who search for a given keyword. Some tools measure this per day, per month, or per 100 days.
• Competition: These are the other sites that aim to rank well in the same keyword as you do.
• Search engine result pages (SERPS): The term itself is descriptive — these are the pages of results that appear when you type a keyword into a search engine.
• Back link: A link to your site from another site.
• On-page optimization. These are the SEO techniques you apply on your blog or site itself, and therefore have most control over. It doesn’t involve outside factors such as getting backlinks from other sites.

How Important is SEO?

Applying even the most basic on-page optimization can bring in better, more qualified traffic from search engines. Still, SEO is not the only way to draw new visitors to your site. Nothing beats creating quality content that people will want to share. SEO is just the polish that will make your site appear more accessible to search engine crawlers. Without solid content behind it, SEO by itself will not make a difference in the long run.

At the same time, there’s such a thing as overdoing it. Don’t apply short-sighted techniques, such as stuffing your site with unnecessary keywords, or getting hundreds of back links from irrelevant sites. Doing this will make your site seem like spam to visitors, ad could even be banned by the search engines from showing up in SERPS altogether (Google has some guidelines on techniques to avoid here).

Choosing Keywords

The first step is to come up with a “seed list.” Think about all the possible keywords (or phrases) your target audience will use when looking for a site like yours. If you’re providing a specific service, make sure to include keywords related to that service.

After that, check out the search metrics of the words in your seed list, to find out which to optimize your site’s copy for. You need to find out the search volume and level of competition for each keyword. You can do this with some free tools:

• WordTracker’s free version. (Doesn’t include competition data.)
• Keyword Discovery‘s free version. (Doesn’t include competition data.)
• Nichebot Classic. It’s powered by WordTracker, but links to competition data (although you have to click to get the numbers).

Here’s a good rule of thumb to remember: apart from relevance, good keywords have high search volume but low competition. The mistake many beginners make is that they aim for the most popularly-searched keywords (those with high search volume). While there’s nothing wrong with that, competition for those terms is so strong that it’s hard to rank well for them in the SERPS. By adding a few modifiers (additional words to make a more specific phrase) to popular keywords, you have a better chance of ranking well.

Getting to Work

Performing on-page optimization throughout your web site is easy, especially if you are familiar with HTML. Even if you aren’t, there are dozens of online tutorials out there which can help you find and tweak the code on your web site with little difficulty.

URLs. The first thing you should look at is your URLs. Does your domain name contain an important keyword? If it does, that’s a bonus. If not, then channel your efforts into crafting SEO-friendly URLs for the pages of your site or the posts of your blog. For example, a page about hiring logo designers is better if given the following url: http://www.example.com/hiring-logo-designers. Avoid using only dates, numbers, and irrelevant words as the URLs of your pages. Note that descriptive “search engine friendly” URLs may not affect ranking themselves, but people will be more likely to click through a page with a descriptive URL from a SERP.

Page title. This line of text (in the <title> tag) appears on the title bar of your browser when you’re looking at a web site. It should contain your primary target keywords, but don’t overdo it. This title will appear in SERPs, and you don’t want it to look like keyword-stuffed spam.

Headings. The heading tags of your pages (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) serve a dual purpose. They show your readers the hierarchy of information on a page, and they are also useful for SEO. Use relevant keywords within these tags.

Content. Your content should contain a few of your choice keywords, but you should be careful that the added keywords aren’t detrimental to a visitor’s reading experience. Make sure the keywords are there when necessary, but don’t insert them in every other sentence just because you think the search engine bots will like it.

Additional Resources

If you want to learn more, here are some guides you can start with:

• I already linked to the SEOmoz dictionary above, but the entire site has a collection of good resources, particularly The Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO and Beginner’s Guide to SEO.
• WebsitePublisher.net has a clear and simple SEO guide.
• As for what you shouldn’t do, Lyndsay Walker wrote a two-part series on SEO tricks to avoid.

Have you ever tried optimizing your site? What were the results?

Image by svilen001 from sxc.hu

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

AltSearchEngines has a post up on an interesting search engine concept currently in beta: Springo. The site’s tagline is “shortcutting the Web,” and it specializes in providing categorized results as well as thumbnails of sites related to your search terms, where the thumbnails can keep you from having to click through to various sites until you arrive at what you’re looking for. I wouldn’t use Springo for common search tasks I do every day, such as sifting through news headlines and announcements, but as a way to preview relevant sites in various site categories, it is useful.

A good way to get the feel of Springo is to go to the home page and enter the keyword “jobs” in the search field, then press “Go.” If you do this, on the left side of your search results page, you’ll get a “Narrow” categorized list of job-related site categories, with an “Expand” tab that will give you more if you want. In the “Narrow” list you get categories such as “Work from Home,” “Professionals and Freelancers,” and “Job Search Engines,” as seen to the right.

I clicked on the category “Professionals and Freelancers,” and got a collection of thumbnail views of sites in the category, as seen below. (There are more of these thumbnails available to scan.) Elance and RentACoder both show up as thumbnails, and both sites you should be familiar with, as we’ve written about them many times before. The expanded list contains many other similar sites that we’ve written about for freelancers, such as oDesk.

Springo looks equally useful for other category-oriented types of site discovery searches. For example, do a search on “Browsers” and you’ll get back four neat thumbnails for IE, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome. You’ll also get categorized collections of sites specializing in toolbars and add-ons, and more.

I wouldn’t use Springo for granular searches on the day’s news, or for definitions and targeted types of research. However, as a site discovery tool within categories you specify with keywords, it does a good job.

What niche search engines do you use?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why Google Should Fear the Social Web
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

As described in this post, Kosmix is based on the following notion: “Search engines are great finding the needle in a haystack. And that’s perfect when you are looking for a needle. Often though, the main objective is not so much to find a specific needle as to explore the entire haystack.”

Kosmix does standard searches, but it delivers your results by assembling complex “topic pages” on the fly so that you can investigate your search topic from many angles. Kosmix is partnered with many services, so some of the results come from partners, and others are gathered from applying your search string to video libraries and other sources.

How useful this is depends on what you are searching for. Let’s take the example of a technology product: the Asus Eee PC netbook. My results when searching for “Asus Eee PC” included videos of the systems from Truveo, YouTube, Blinkx and elsewhere, Google and Wikipedia results, listings and prices from Shopping.com, and many more types of results.

The topic pages are rich enough that it’s worth looking into some of the less obvious links among the results. For example, my Asus Eee PC search gave me a “blogs” link atop the page, and when I clicked on it I got lots of blog posts on the Eee PC, including a timely one from GigaOm. The original search also gave me a Reviews link atop the page.

Having tried a number of types of searches, Kosmix looks good for comparison-oriented searching, such as shopping for new tech products, comparing thumbnails of videos and images from various outlets that may be of interest, and looking from an aerial view at reviews from disparate authors. If you’re stuck in the Google rut, give it a try.

Disclosure: Kosmix founders Venky Harinarayan & Anand Rajaraman are angel investors in Giga Omni Media, the parent company of this blog.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why Google Should Fear the Social Web
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce