When a user searches for a keyword, search engines like Baidu and Google primarily rank websites based on three core principles: relevance, authority, and usability. When conducting website SEO, only by adhering to these three principles can one achieve the best optimization results in the shortest amount of time.
### 1. The Principle of Relevance in SEO
Relevance refers to when a user searches for a keyword, the search engine first looks for the most relevant websites from its large database to display. Generally speaking, the higher the relevance, the higher the website's ranking. Search engines determine the relevance of a website to the search term mainly based on the content layout within the website. Therefore, the first step in SEO is to layout related keywords and long-tail keywords within the website.
#### 1.1 Keyword Layout in Title, Description, and Keywords Tags
In a webpage, the content closer to the top is more important. When a search engine visits a website, it first reads the tag information such as the title. Moreover, the title and other tags summarize the content of a webpage, making this the most crucial place for search engines to judge relevance.
The title is currently the most important factor affecting SEO rankings. In the webpage title, there are usually 1-2 core keywords integrated, with the possibility of repeating them through long-tail keywords if necessary. The webpage title should ideally be a semantically coherent short sentence or phrase, and one must avoid over-stuffing keywords, which not only affects user experience but also risks being seen as spam by search engines. The description should be a semantically coherent paragraph made up of several sentences, summarizing the page content. Try to integrate long-tail keywords related to the core keywords into the description, which helps increase keyword density and incorporate more user search terms.
Since both the title and description appear on the search results page, they are the basis for whether users are willing to click and enter the site. Therefore, when writing the title and description, we should first consider the user experience before thinking about search engine principles.
The role of the keywords tag has significantly diminished in recent times, and many websites have skipped writing it altogether. If too many keywords are stuffed into the keywords tag, it may even have adverse effects. Yue Hao suggests that when writing the keywords tag, integrating 2-3 keywords is sufficient, and these keywords must be relevant to the page content.
#### 1.2 Keyword Layout in Website Navigation, Category Names, and Article Titles
Website navigation is generally located at the very top of the page and appears on all pages throughout the entire site, so it holds a very high weight in a website. Therefore, we should consciously layout keywords in the navigation text. A page's content is often divided into different categories, and reasonably incorporating keywords into category names is also very important because category names are relatively important information on a page. Article titles serve as indexes for website content on the homepage and channel pages, and as summaries of webpage content on content pages, making them a very significant factor that search engines consider when determining relevance.
#### 1.3 Keyword Layout in Links
Keyword links are what people commonly refer to as anchor texts, which are extremely important for SEO and come second only to title tags. Keyword links are divided into internal links and external links, both of which have a noticeable impact on keyword rankings. Internal links are keyword links between different pages of the same website, while external links are keyword links from other websites pointing to our site. Friendship links, which people often talk about, are actually a type of external link.
Shared resources on the internet rely heavily on links, so search engines place great importance on links and the text within them. Internal links are often achieved through navigation text, breadcrumb navigation, and keyword links within content pages. External links are typically obtained through friendship links, blogs, and forum backlinks. The websites where external links reside must be content-related to our website for these external links to yield better results.
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