SEO Made Simple
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is basically everything you do to make sure your site shows up on Google, Bing, and whatever search engines people are using nowadays. SEO is part-science and part-art. The ideal SEO strategy for you and your site is going to be personalized for you. There is no one-size-fits-all SEO strategy, and this is not a winner-take-all game. Let’s get started.
Why Care About SEO?
Let’s start with a few statistics:
- 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
- 75% of people never scroll past the first page of search engines
Most of the traffic on searches goes to the top 3 results. Don’t believe me? Next time you are with someone who Googles something, watch them. See what options they click on. Watch how they scroll and read the options. Do they even get past the first few options? Probably not. Do they go to the second page? Absolutely not. If it’s not on the first page, it doesn’t get seen. Period.
Therefore, we need to get as close to the top of the search results as possible. It is key to get into the top 3, as that is where most of the clicks happen!
Keywords and Keyphrases
What is a Keyword?
A Keyword is the word or phrase that a user will search, for which you want your page to show up in the search results as high as possible. For instance, if you are writing about your new dentistry business, a good Keyword for you to use could be ‘new dentists in my area’. That way, when someone searches ‘new dentists in my area’ your page is going to be shown more prominently on Google.
Note: Keyword and Keyphrase are going to be used interchangeably for our purposes. Essentially, a Keyphrase is just a longer version of a Keyword, however Yoast or any other SEO plugin won’t limit your Keyword to one word. And in many cases, limiting a Keyword to one word would be a big mistake, which we will see.
Keyword Selection is a KEY part of SEO, and outside of content creation is the number 1 SEO skill to sharpen. Keyword Selection could be the reason your blog post gets 10 views or 10,000 views. It seems like a small exercise, but the implications are profound!
‘Tail’ Concept
What we will call the ‘Tail’ Concept is going to be CRITICAL as we move forward. This beautiful graph explains it very well.
Short Tail keywords are words that are searched often. Think ‘restaurants near me’ or ‘how to cook chicken’.
Medium Tail keywords are searched less often. Things like ‘vegan thai restaurants near me’ or ‘how to bake parmesan chicken’
Long Tail keywords are searched very rarely. Things like ‘vegan thai restaurants near me that cater for large groups’ or ‘how to bake parmesan chicken with panko bread crumbs for 10 people’
When choosing keywords, we will strategically choose whether to use Short-, Medium-, or Long-Tail keywords based on your specific site and content!
Congratulations, you have made it about one quarter of the way to being an SEO superstar!
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