What is SEO and what can it do for you
SEO stands for search engine optimization. Simply put, it means organizing, writing and linking to your website in such a way that you get more free traffic from search engines. Contrary to what many people think, SEO does not have to cost money. You can do it yourself. However, if you do not have money to invest, make sure you have the time to invest because when it comes to optimizing your website for search engines, you can either outsource the work to somebody who knows what they are doing, or you take the time to learn and do what is needed to enable your website to get more search engine love.
Classic SEO will never change
By classic we mean timeless. We mean a method that would withstand the ravages of time and the most classic form of SEO does not involve fancy or complicated reorganization/engineering of your website. It is very simple–invest in high-quality content for your website. It is as simple as that. Put content there that the people you want to target will find interesting. Give them the content they are looking for. Depending on your business’ niche, this could be informative articles, this could be very clear, accurate and useful videos, it could even be diagrams, photo collections, or art collections, and it could even be a collection of books. The content must mirror the content that they are looking for.
Authority is Your Goal
Whatever shape or form it takes, classic SEO revolves around building the authority of your site. When people mention a particular subject matter, if your website’s domain name is the first that comes to mind, then you are doing a good job. For example, if your website’s name is dogkennelguide.com and the word dog kennel or dog housing is mentioned and your website is the first that comes to mind, then you have become an authority in that field. Classic SEO is all about becoming an authority in a field of content. There are no secrets, fancy writing methods, or “secret” software that you could buy. There is also no massive outsourcing of link building.
Quality Content One Page at a Time
Classic SEO builds your website one quality page at a time. You thoroughly edit the quality of the page to make sure that it is loaded with accurate, useful and deep information. If it does not live up to these criterias, you should not publish. This method of getting search engine traffic is very slow. It might take almost forever for people to find out about your website. However, it is greatly helped by word of mouth. If your website starts to get a reputation for being the “go to site” for a particular subject category, people that are in that particular community who are looking for that particular content will refer their friends. Their friends will refer their friends, so on and so forth.
Natural Link Building
Eventually, people will start mentioning you in social networking sites and that will build up traffic. Others would start blogging about you and that would build up traffic. Ultimately, online magazines or even newspapers would start linking to you and that would build traffic. Finally, Wikipedia would use you as a resource and that builds traffic. The key here is authority and not chasing after quick traffic. The people themselves and the internet itself will democratically determine that your site is high-quality website and it will soon beat a path to your door.
Classic SEO is ultimately the only way to SEO your website for the long term. The SEO tips and techniques that we will discuss below may jump start the process, but it does not replace the necessity for the number one reason your site should exist–to provide valuable content to your website’s visitors.
SEO Basics
When SEO is mentioned, it actually refers to two different categories of optimization activities. One category is onsite SEO. This optimization focuses on the elements found on your website. This involves reorganizing your website, writing it a certain way, and coding pages in a certain way. Regardless of the action, it all involves working on inside elements of your website. On the other hand, offsite SEO involves actions that are done that do not involve your website. This typically involves building links from other sites to your website.
On-Site SEO
Follow these steps to optimize your website for search engines.
Keyword Research: Use keywords your target visitors use
Search engine users find websites by typing in keywords. Make sure that you code your website to keywords that your target traffic actually uses. For example, if your website is a fish and chips website, the normal keyword to use for that is “fish and chips restaurant” and your city name or “fish and chips” and your city name. However, if your website is named “Bobby’s Fish and Chips in Washington Avenue” and instead of “fish and chips” you used the keyword “Bobby’s” or worse “Washington Avenue,” you probably are not going to get much traffic from your particular city. If you do get traffic, it probably is not going to be targeted traffic. You have to be very specific in the keyword that you select. Make sure it is the keyword that your target customers use to find the type of website that you have.
Keyword Research: Use keywords with decent search volumes
Not all keywords carry the same amount of traffic. There are certain keywords that might be used to find your website but they are worthless to you if they are used by very few people. Pay attention to search volume. Look for keywords that get traffic. Keywords that do not have traffic will not do you any good even if you rank number one for them. To get going base some of your research on Google Keyword Tool it will help you a long way and when you know what you’re doing checkout SEO Tools like SEMRush and SEOmoz.
Keyword Research: Select keywords based on competition level
Sure you found the keyword that your target customers use and this keyword has a lot of traffic. Looking good so far, right? The bad news is that if your keyword has a lot of traffic, expect your competitors to target that keyword as well. The end result is you probably will not get much benefit from that keyword because everybody else is optimizing for that keyword.
You will have to make a judgment call regarding your keyword’s traffic level balanced against the competition level for that keyword. Think of it this way, if you have a keyword that gets 1000 visitors a day and, because there are so many competitors, you estimate your share of that volume is only maybe 1%. Ten people. Keep in mind that just because they searched for a certain term does not mean they will click through. You have to apply a filter to that ten, so maybe even five or even two of them would click through. Compare that with another keyword that is related to your website or is actually super targeted to your website, but it gets only 50 people searching per day tut there is no competition. If you rank number one for that 50, then you can get more traffic than shooting for that huge keyword that gets a lot of traffic. Also, you can target many such smaller keywords with little competition and these small trickles of traffic add up to a nice river of traffic. This should be your strategy because sometimes less is more. Do not always go for the keywords that your competition is focused on.
Use Keyword-targeted Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, and File Names
Google organizes its index based on page titles. Make sure that your keyword is reflected in your page titles because that is how Google finds and organizes pages primarily. Another important element is the description meta tag of your pages. Make sure that it includes your keywords; the description must read like short normal English sentences. Also, you have to write your sentence in such a way that it advertises your site and entices the reader to click through. Remember that Google organizes its listings based on titles and then under the titles would be a description. The description must be written in such a way that a person would get a clear idea that this is the website he has been looking for. You have to use words that call the user to action. It is like writing a resume.
Another key area where you have to put your keywords is the file names of your web pages. File names also carry some weight. If a page is describing dog training, make sure that the file name for that page has dog training somewhere in the file name.
Use large text size for your page’s main keyword
In the actual body of your content, search engines also pay attention to font size. They normally assume that the larger the font size, the more important that word is because it sets the category of that word or that big word in H1 size sets the theme or the category for the page. This is very important. Make sure that you put your categorical keyword, which is different from your ordinary keyword, high up on the page in H1 size.
You have to play around with the code of the website because H1 is a really ugly size. You can work with your website designer to make this look good, but this has to be addressed. There is a hierarchy in terms of text sizes. There is H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6. You have to prioritize the content in such a way that your main keyword is getting the H1, the sub-keywords that you can hit get the H2 and then the supporting keywords get the H3.
Keyword optimize your page’s Picture tags
Picture tags needs to be a keyword and coded as well. This is very powerful because many people find websites through Google image search. If you are not doing this, your competition might be. Tag your pictures with your keywords.
Always use relevant keywords
One word of warning: when keyword optimizing all the elements above–make sure that the keyword is relevant. If you are putting a keyword on a page that has completely nothing to do with the word then you are spamming. Google will eventually somehow and someway punish you for it. Take our word for it. Play nice and be ethical. Do not misrepresent. Make sure that the page a keyword is on is actually related to that keyword.
Map out your website based on your target keywords
Your keywords should form a map of your website. You have to look at thematic relationships between your main keyword targets, the sub keywords that support them, and the sub-sub keywords that form their underlying support. They all have to flow together. They all have to make sense and be relevant. They all have to stand for pages or elements within pages that form information that your target visitor would find interesting. This is like walking on a tightrope. On the one hand you are trying not to lean too heavily on writing the page for search engine robots, and on the other hand you are trying to write the page in such a way that it is still readable by humans.
Write out your content with your keywords in mind
There is a saying that “all roads lead to Rome.” Similarly, everything in your site must lead to you getting traffic from search engines. This means writing your website based on your target keywords. If you follow the step above regarding organizing your web pages around your keywords, then you have won half the battle. The next step is to write useful content based on those keyword clusters. Each page must be keyword driven and you must interlink them to each other based on your keyword map, so they must pass value to each other and each page must on its own make sense. You pages cannot be composed of just keywords-they have to appeal to your human visitors. It must give them the information that they have been looking for.
Layout a Site map
If you have a very clear navigation system for your website, a site map can be dispensed with. If you don’t have a clear navigation system, have a considerable amount of content, have a lot of page located within a very complicated tree structure, then a site map is indispensable. There are free tools you could use online that would map out your website for you and generate a free site map.
Optimize your website’s load time
Google has made it clear that they consider load time as one factor in determining the ranking of a website. Make sure that your website loads quickly. This means going with a reputable host that serves content very quickly. Some webmasters even go so far as to use content caching services where the content is served out of fast servers leased out by large content mirroring companies. Regardless, site speed is very important and you have to check it constantly. You may want to put fewer pictures on your pages so it loads faster. You may want to compress your HTML. Other tricks involve breaking up your pages into less text per page. Regardless of what you need to do, make sure your pages load quickly.
Avoid Duplicate Content as much as you can
Duplicate content is a problem. When it comes to duplicate content, search engines talk on both sides of their mouth. On the one hand, they say that duplicate content is not really a problem that they would still index your website and you do not need to worry about it. On the other hand, if they come up with an update, it destroys websites that have a lot of duplicate content if they present it a certain way. Where is the truth? The truth is it is both. Duplicate content in itself does not doom your website. However, if you use it a certain way, it will impact your site’s ranking and impact your traffic. No traffic means no money and less traffic means less money. It is as simple as that.
Our advice is just to avoid duplicate content at all. Just avoid it entirely and always produce original material even if you are just rehashing old news or old content, present it in a new way and rewrite it. The stakes are too high for duplicate content. Here’s a case study: for many years, people would just scrape other people’s content, put a different heading on it, repackage it with different keywords and then put it on their website. For a long time, Google ignored this and still ranked sites normally. However, earlier this year, it started paying attention to content originality and a lot of websites that basically just repack existing content got penalized hard. Many of them are still on their knees and cannot recover. Content originality is that crucial. Original content is better for your website’s users and it is better for your pocket book in the long run.
Off-Site SEO
Offsite SEO’s are activities that you do that are done outside of your website. They are done on other websites to impact your website’s ranking. They are primarily involved in building links to your website. These are called backlinks.
Backlinking Defied
When you build a link from one website to go to your website and that link uses your keyword as an anchor, you are back linking. Technically, putting just your URL on other sites is back linking, but the juice that is being sent is so weak that we do not refer to that practice as backlinking. For our purposes, backlinking means taking your keyword, linking it to your URL and then creating that link on another website.
How does back linking work?
Google and other search engines look at each link from another site to your website as a vote for your website. However, the word that is used to link to you dictates the nature of that vote. If you have a cat care website or a pet cat website and I link to your URL using the word “cats,” then I am indicating that I am vouching for this site because it has something to do with cats. If I use the word “jet plane,” but if you have a cat website, then I am voting for you as a jet plane site and that does not count. That does not do you any favors. When backlinking, make sure that the anchor text is relevant to your website, preferably use your keyword.
Do-Follow Versus No-Follow Back Links
Not all back links are the same. Some back links count as a vote, other do not. The ones that do not count as a vote have been tagged “no follow.” Several years ago, Google came up with this new HTML tag called no follow. When Google’s robot is crawling through a website’s links, if it comes across this tag, it does not follow the link to your website. The link does not count as a vote. In this situation, if a link to your site has been tagged no follow, then it does you no good. There are many tools available online where you can go through a link list and see which are do follow, meaning the vote goes through and no follow, which the vote does not go through. Remember, when you are building backlinks you are trying to get as many relevant votes as possible.
Page Rank Versus No Page Rank
In addition to do follow and no follow, back links also differ based on the quality of the website that is voting for you. If the president of the USA says you are an authority at a certain subject, that carries a lot more weight than if your little baby brother says you are an authority on that same subject matter. People would give more weight to the president. The same applies to websites. Certain websites in their particular niche or subject category carry a lot more credibility than other websites for you to get links from those websites. One short hand for the credibility of a website is its page rank. Again this is not dispositive. Just because a site has a high page rank does not necessarily mean it is actually an authority site. Be still very careful. Normally, page rank carries some weight. If do not have much time when trying to build backlinks and you do not have much resources, shoot for the high page rank website to build back links on. Make sure that they are do-follow links or else you are just wasting your time.
Niche Related or Not
Another differentiation for back links is whether the site linking to you is related to your category or not. Let us say your pet care website got a backlink from a website and it is a do-follow link, it is a high page rank site. However, the website sells jet engines. Whatever link love that jet engine site sends you, it does not really help you because it is not in your category. You are in the pets category and the backlink is in the transportation or mechanical or engineering category. You are looking for high value, high page rank do-follow links from websites that are in your category. Niche carries a lot of weight.
Link Placement Matters
So you have had a do follow link from a website that has a high page rank and is in your category. However, if they put the backlink to you in a less desirable location or a low-priority location on their website, then you are getting less value for that backlink. Blog comments do not pass as much value as links within an actual blog post. Links in the blogroll carry less weight than links inside an actual blog post, so placement and location of the link matter a lot. Try to get your link into the actual content.
Link Saturation
Even if you are getting links from high-value sites that are niche related and is a do-follow link, it still will not pack as much value if the remote site is linking to you from content that is packed with other links. Each page can pass only so much “link juice”. When there are many links on the same page sucking up the link juice, the individual link value each link passes is reduced.
Always Track Keyword Ranking
Once you have built your website and you have optimized it onsite and offsite, you must constantly monitor how well you are doing with the search engines. You can do this by typing in your keyword into Google and then paying attention to where you show up on the search results list. Track this for all the keywords that you are using for your website. Do this periodically or weekly if you can. Try to detect patterns and this would help you determine which page to build out, which content to add, what type of links to build, and otherwise map out your SEO strategy.
Always Check Indexing
Go to Google webmaster tools or type in site: and the domain name of your website to see how many of your pages are indexed. The more pages that are indexed in a search engine, the better shape you are in because each page in the index is like a hook. The more hooks you have in the search engines, the better your chance of getting traffic. Of course, you have to optimize them so that they get the right kind of fish and that has been covered under onsite SEO above.
Use These Tools
Google and Yahoo! have tools that you can use for diagnostics and for checking web page elements that would help you in your SEO efforts. Google webmaster tools feature has a page speed tool and all sorts of diagnostics that you can run. It is a great resource and you should use it. Optionally you could also try Yahoo! webmaster tools until Microsoft Webmaster Central will become the one place for all Bing and Yahoo webmaster topics and analytics data. This has a great back link checking tool set because it allows you to see how many web sites are linking back to you and this will help you build up your back links.
Finally, Google Analytics is a great way to check your page’s performance. It is a great tool for finding the keywords that you do well on and also it gives you information on how to optimize your content so that it is useful to your users. The more useful your pages are to your target users, the better you look in the eyes of Google. Keep in mind that Google is looking for trusted websites. It can detect that your website has quality information and then eventually you rank higher. Normally it does not use analytics information for doing its quality determination unless you give it permission to do so, but giving it permission early on before you have fully optimized and cleaned up your website might do you more harm than good. Because in the beginning if Google asked you if it can use the information that it gathers for reporting purposes, do not do that and say no. Eventually you can say yes once you are confident that your website is quality.
How do you determine quality using Google Analytics? There are two key elements and one is bounce rate. Bounce rate is when somebody goes into your website and immediately bounces out. The quicker they do it, the worse you look because it means that your website does not have the information they are looking for. Make sure that your bounce rate is very low. Another indicator of quality is visitor path. If your visitor clicks through many pages on your website, then chances are good that they find it worth visiting and that the content that you have is of good quality. Make sure that you structure your content in such a way that people will click through and that you stock it with high-quality content that people would want to read.
The Bottom Line
Search engine optimization is a marathon, it is not a sprint. Those who are in it for the long run in the end do better than those who are in it for a quick buck. There will always be quick buck artists that pollute the internet with garbage websites using stolen content or very low quality/ inferior content. Let them be because they will get what is coming to them. The recent updates of Google have penalized quick-buck type of operations. If you are serious about making money online, then you must be serious about focusing on content quality. Over time, quality wins over quantity. Pour your heart out into your site, make sure it is the best it could be and everything else will take care of itself. Just use the tips we outlined above to get you site a little bit of a push start, but eventually it is your website’s own quality that will determine whether succeed or fail.
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