SEO: The Key to Being Found on the Internet

 One of the hardest things for businesses who are just getting started on the web is becoming a prevalent search result. When there are tons of well established websites how are you supposed to get your site to the top of the list? This is when Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play. 

What is SEO all about?

SEO entails improving a website to attract more visitors from search engines. Well that seems pretty simple doesn’t it? Not so fast. In order to become one of the top listed results on a search engines page your webpage needs to be considered an authority and popular among the search keywords. While there are a number of search engines, you should spend time making sure your website is optimized on at least the three major engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo. Google is the top dog and gets the vast majority of all searches but that does not mean the others should be forgotten about.

Now that we have an understanding of SEO we can dive into how exactly the process works…

1. Know your Target Market

Think about what your company is offering and who is likely to be searching for you on the internet. This is important because certain groups of people will use different language when searching among other things. A good method to gain more information about what they are searching is to find the leading results on a search engine for your product category.

2. Keyword Research

Now that you know which topics searchers want to know and the language which they are using, it is time find the words that most relate to your business. These can be long-tail-keywords or simple words, however it is far more difficult to become a leading result for a broad term such as “shoes”. There are a number of online research tools that should be utilized to help reduce the workload. An ideal keyword will have a high search volume and low competition.

3. Create Content Around Keywords

Once you have group of keywords, it is necessary to create content that is relevant to those keywords. You want to mention your key words in the content but do not overuse them. Based on the content and language of your website a search engine will determine when your site is something users intend to find.

4. Optimize Pages

Add your keyword(s) to the page title and url, body, header and in image-alt text as this will help search engines turn traffic to your site. If your keyword is a long-tail be sure to separate the words by “-“. Next, include relevant and trusted links in your content to build a sense of authority and legitimacy. These links should come from both external and internal sources. Finally, promote a good user experience with an intuitive and easy to browse website that also translate to mobile platforms.

5. Promote your Content

Utilize social media and emails to get as much reach as possible from your content.

6. Earn Links to your Content

Links are ever valuable and can be the make or break between having your website on page one of Google or page ten. Not just any link will do, high quality links must be used as search engines will see these as being far more valuable. An easy way to create strong links is to make a “Best of…” list and give credit to each source that is used, this will create a direct link.

What is all this business about link building you may ask? It is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your website and vice versa. Search engines use links as a way to maneuver through the web and track site popularity. Link building is often seen as the most difficult part of a SEOs job, which means if you can do it consistently well you will be able to propel your business past the competition.

There are two primary ways in which links are used by search engines, to discover new webpages and to help determining a pages rank among the competition. Once a search engine has extracted the content from a link, they are able to decide how it should be ranked for the keywords used. They take more than simply the content of a page into account, this video will dive deeper into how Googles search works.

Some common tactics for link building include:

• Content-based link building: You create content which you use to try and get links.
• Guest blogging: This involves approaching other websites to see if they will publish a piece of content that you wrote.
• Ego bait: Plays on the egos of people. By featuring them on a post, they hope that these will then share the content with a link.

Now that you know some tactics for building links, you need some metrics to test how well they are doing. There is a wide variety of metrics you can use to help judge the value of potential links.

• Domain strength
• Page strength
• Anchor text
• Number of links
• Linking root domains
• Relevance of linking page
• Position of links on page

Overall link building will help your business in a number of ways, from building relationships to sending referral traffic and brand building.

I hope this “brief” overview of SEO and Link Building has been of some value to you. If you are interested in learning more check out The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building and The Beginner’s Guide to SEO both wonderful resources provided by Moz.