beginners guide to seo

A Zazzle Beginner’s Guide To SEO

Alex Jones 9 years ago

Welcome to the first part of my beginner's guide to SEO. I joined Zazzle Media this summer and a lot of the terms might as well have been another language. However, with a lot of my "free time" spent with my nose in a book or searching through the Internet to get up to speed, I've worked out (roughly) what it is that I'm meant to be doing.

This is my guide for people who, like me, have no idea what some of the terms associated with SEO mean and I hope this clears up any confusion for you. Keep checking back to the Zazzle Media blog for the next instalment of my beginner's guide.

As someone relatively new to the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) industry, I have spent many hours of my short Zazzle Media career reading up on the various terms I hear bouncing around our office, trying to find out just what exactly the guru’s of Google I call my colleagues are on about.

Having gone to bed with words such as ‘meta strategy’ and ‘PageRank’ echoing in my ears, I think I’ve just about gotten myself to a point where I feel comfortable explaining to people who are just like me to see if I can pass on my experiences and newly found knowledge, (or lack of, we’ll see how this goes).

Right, we’ll start at the beginning. SEOMoz, who are arguably the biggest hitters in the business worldwide, (so big they even included our very own Simon Penson’s recent blog, "Post-Panda Content Strategy - Lessons from Magazine Editing," on their website), “the active practice of optimizing a website by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic that the site receives from search engines.” This refers to things such as the websites that link to your page, the sites that your page links to, and also the content on your website.

So now you know what it is, why do companies and individuals need SEO? Well, the majority of traffic on any website is directed by search engines, such as Google and Bing. If the search engines cannot find your site, or your content can’t be put into their databases, you will find that you miss out on a lot of potential visitors, customers and advertisers.

Believe it or not, the words you type into the search engines are crucial. These terms and phrases can make or break a website, because if you use them the right way, with SEO, they could end up appearing on the first three pages of the search results. Why the first three and not the first ten or twenty? Studies show that people only go as far as the first three pages of results before they either find what they’re looking for, or simply move on. That is why good quality content, mixed with SEO, is unbelievably crucial.

Head spinning yet? Don’t worry - mine was too at first. If you want to find out more information about how SEO can help your website, get in touch with the experts here at Zazzle Media and we'll get you on the right track.

If a step-up is what you're looking for, perhaps our value adding checklist for priority SEO changes will be what you're looking for, alternatively the free SEO reporting template is a popular resource for getting the best from your content activity.

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