If you are building a website for the very first time then you’ve probably seen the phrase SEO come up a time or two. But what does SEO stand for and why exactly should web developers care about it? The term itself stands for search engine optimization, and the goal of SEO is to help both users and the search engines read your site, determine what the important content is, and then for the search engines to rank your pages accordingly. This is not a subject that requires stressful thinking and work however. By making a website that has a very clear structure, along with writing titles for your posts that accurately describe the content in them, you will be getting 95% of the SEO benefit that you can, and as the months and years go by you will pick up the little nuances that will put you above the rest of the pack.

Using Descriptive Titles
For many of us writers, it is easy to write a post on a topic that we find interesting or necessary, let’s say homemade window cleaners, and then title the entire post “This is hard work…” Don’t be ‘creative’ like that! Instead, make sure you have the subject of the post in the title. Call it “Making Homemade Window Cleaners” is hard work or whatever else you want, but just make sure it is in the title, so the search engines can list you in their rankings, and you will get readers who are looking for information on window cleaners to click through. If you do not put these keywords in the title of the page, you probably will not rank in Google or Bing, and readers will be initially confused when reading each of your entries – not the impression you want to give.

Creating a Great Site Structure
The term site structure sounds scary, but its really not. This just refers to the links that you use inside your site to link to other pages. So if I have a blog about windows cleaners, and I want to refer to another article on the blog that talks about sales at Walmart, I may use a link to make it easy for people to get to that new page. Search engines, and users in general, will use these to determine the most important pages. The pages that are linked to at the top of any blog are usually the most important pages, and since they are at the top of every page, they have the most internal links. The site structure puts them near the top. You can also do this by putting a list of top posts in the sidebar of your page. When they are linked to by every page on your site, they are clearly important and will receive more consideration from readers and spiders alike.

These are a couple of the most basic SEO ideas, and they are enough to take you a long way. By continuing to refine these types of ideas, you will see your site to the top of the search engines in no time at all. For more tips and tutorials on putting a website today, visit Website Obsession today.