The Basics of SEO Unleashed (Search Engine Optimization)
How many times have you scratched your head in amazement over the results your competitors are getting in Google and Yahoo for keywords that you are trying to rank for? Don’t worry; it happens to all of us. The fact of the matter is that it’s not easy to achieve high rankings in the search engines; but it can be done.
Since the consumer adoption of high-speed internet is growing exponentially across the U.S. and more consumers are using search engines for researching products and services; the competition to attract their attention has also increased. For this reason, it’s imperative for businesses to adopt an SEO strategy if they wish to succeed with their online marketing initiatives. The opportunity cost of ignoring SEO is a mass influx of highly targeted web visitors that statistically tend to convert higher than do visitors from paid search; as well as a multitude of revenue opportunities.
Quick and easy definition of SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of creating, altering and manipulating a webpage or website in a method that allows it to perform well in the search engines; such as ranking high for targeted keywords. The primary goal of SEO is to generate more traffic for a website; with a secondary goal of increasing conversion rates. A conversion rate is the percentage of consumers that perform a pre-determined task while visiting a website. A task can include a purchase, filling out a form, downloading a white paper, or any other action that a webmaster or marketer deems important. Typically, website visitors that click on a natural search result tend to have higher conversion rates.
The first step is On-page optimization
Title Tag - The title tag is one portion of all the meta-tags on the page. It’s not visible to your website visitors but the search engine spiders look at this to help determine relevancy. It is important that whatever keywords that you want to rank for; you include those terms in the title tag. Be careful not to flood the title tag with hundreds of keywords as it is considered spam to do so by the search engines. It’s better to focus on two or three keywords. For example, if you are trying to rank for the following terms (wedding diet, wedding weight loss and wedding and bridal diet) your title tag might look like this:
Wedding Weight Loss and Bridal Diet from yourdomain.com
Notice that I put the keywords before your company name. It’s important to have the keywords that you want to rank for first so when consumers search for those terms, they can see them in the search results. Data proves that there is always a higher click through rate when searchers see the keywords they are looking for in the actual search results.
Description Tag – the description tag actually describes to the search engines the content on the page. In the above example, your description tag might look something like this:
Yourdomain.com offers unique wedding weight loss and bridal
diet products for both brides and grooms.
Notice here that I am basically repeating the title tag almost word for word. The above example is just one idea; however, you can use whatever other messaging you feel is important.
Keyword Tag - There used to be a time in internet history when webmasters could add hundreds of keywords in this tag and rank number one for all of them. Not anymore. However, they still do hold some weight (no pun intended). In the above example, the keyword tag should look something like this:
wedding weight loss, bridal diet
It looks as if I only added two keywords; however, the search engines are smart enough to use variations of every word in your keyword tag. Thus, they can extract the following variations: wedding, wedding diet, wedding weight loss, bridal, bridal weight loss and bridal diet.
You will often hear or read that meta-tags are no longer effective. This is false. While it doesn’t hold as much weight as it used to, you will never find an optimized website without it. No professional SEO firm skips this task; and if they do, I would question their knowledge of SEO.
H1, H2, H3 tags – also known as the heading tags. The ‘H1′ tag or the header is probably the most significant body tag on a web page. It tells the search engines what the main headline of a web page will be. It should compromise of the targeted keywords that you are trying to rank for. The ‘H2’ and “H3” are respectively sub headings to the “H1” tag.
Internal Anchor Text linking - Using ‘anchor text’ linking throughout your website is imperative. It does two things. It helps the engines index all the pages on your site when they crawl it; and also helps identify content pages on your site linked from anchor text. For example, in the content area of your home page, if you are writing about other weight loss products that your company offers; you will want to use the term weight loss products to link to the page that houses that content. So, instead of ‘click here’ for more information, please consider using ‘For more information on other weight loss products…you get my point.
Site Map – a site map serves two purposes. It helps the visitors on your website quickly find what they are looking for; and also tells the search engine spiders about all the other pages that you have on your website, so they can all get indexed in the search engines.
Excellent content - good, quality content which is appealing to the viewers is indispensable. Nothing can influence the search engines more than good content. However, when you are writing your content, make sure that you are writing to a person and not a search engine. In other words, don’t do something like this:
Hello and welcome to my wedding weight loss website. We have several wedding weight
loss products available for you. We understand that wedding weight loss is important
for your wedding day…blah blah blah.
Additionally, it is very important that you add fresh content to your website regularly, similar to that of a blog which tells the search engines that your web site is very much alive and breathing
The second step is off-page optimization
There are a number of things you can do “off your web page” to improve your search engine results and increase your visibility in the search engines. These factors normally include the number of external websites that are linking to your website. This is commonly referred to as link popularity.
Think of it like this: the more external links you have from credible, reliable and relevant websites, the better for you. Each link to your website from another website is considered a “vote of confidence” to your site’s link popularity from the search engine’s perspective. For example, if you sell pool products and other pool related websites want to link to you; these links would be considered credible, reliable and relevant. Be careful though; engaging in link farm techniques can and will be hazardous o your website’s health.
Link Building – link building is time intensive, frustrating and sometimes confusing. However, it is unavoidable because ultimately, it’s still the trump card for higher search engine rankings. There are several ways to build one way (or inbound) links; and by no means is the following list comprehensive as we don’t want to share our competitive advantage with the public:
- Article Syndication - marketers have been using article syndication (sometimes referred to as article marketing or content distribution) to promote their product and/or service for several years now. Article syndication naturally creates inbound links assuming that the article is good quality and worth reading.
- Press Release Optimization & Distribution - a well written, fully optimized press release can earn you not only valuable media attention and new clients, but also increase your legitimate inbound links.
- Blogs - The search engines value blogs because they are often updated with fresh, new content. The more you post content, the more frequent your pages will be crawled by search engine spiders, and the faster the updates will appear in search results. And, naturally, if your blog is well written with engaging content, you will naturally receive inbound links from other bloggers.
Anchor Text – basically, anchor text is the visible text in a hyperlink. For example, if you want to rank for the term “wedding weight loss”, you will want other websites to link to yours in the following fashion:
Wedding weight loss: Yoursite.com offers a wide array of wedding weight loss products and services.
Keep in mind that the term “wedding weight loss” is the clickable term that will link directly to your site. When engaging in link building techniques, it’s important to vary your anchor text and descriptions; especially if you want to rank for more than just one keyword.
Conclusion
The last thing we want to leave you with is that anyone can learn SEO and achieve high rankings in the search engines. There is a slight learning curve at the beginning and it may take several months before seeing any results; however, it is possible. There are several step by step tutorials that can walk you through the process.
Also, be careful of the websites that offer you thousands of inbound links for a low monthly payment of $24.95. This technique DOES NOT work and could get you banned from the search engines.
Technorati Tags: article marketing, article syndication, article distribution, article submission, search engine optimization, seo, press release optimization
