What Is SEO? (Learn How to Do It in 5 Minutes)

SEO is ‘Search Engine Optimization’ and is still one of the biggest and most well-known forms of

Internet marketing there is. The basic idea behind SEO is to take a website or a blog and then to

manage it in such a way that it climbs the search engines (or Google more specifically in most

cases). Think about it: if you want to eat a pizza, how do you find a local takeaway? Normally

you’ll do it by just searching for ‘Pizza Takeaway in [Your Location Here]’. By doing this, you’re

then able to find the website, phone number and menu of a local takeout and order food – and

you’ll quite likely buy from whichever business is able to come up first.

This is the power of SEO. How you get to that point though is quite complicated and there’s a lot

of misinformation regarding what the best strategy is.

The Basics of SEO

Keywords and Content

The objective of SEO is not really to climb the ranks of ‘Google’ indiscriminately, but

rather it is to climb the ranks of specific SERPs. A SERP is a ‘Search Engine Results

Page’ – which is a page showing results for a particular search query.

These search queries are what are known as ‘keywords’ or ‘key phrases’ in the industry.

An example of a key phrase might be ‘Buy Hats Online’ or ‘Free Fitness eBook’. An

ecommerce company selling hats, or a website trying to grow a fitness-related mailing

list, might well want to target these keywords for their SEO efforts and this could then

lead to them achieving their goals.

Then again though, the term ‘Buy Hats Online’ is one that’s likely to be highly

competitive and it’s rather unlikely that you’d get that one unless you were able to sink

huge amounts of money into your advertising spend (thus reducing your profit margin

and hurting your cash flow).

This is why the first stage of SEO will often involve researching those specific keywords.

This process allows a marketer to identify which terms are being searched for in high

enough volume (there’s no point working for a keyword if no one ever searches for it!)

and at the same time, which terms aren’t currently too competitive. As with choosing

your niche, the trick is to find a sweet spot that’s realistically achievable while still being

worthwhile and potentially lucrative. Likely, you’ll come up with a list of keywords and

this is then what will shape your articles, your file names and other elements of your

site.

Once upon a time, targeting a particular keyword would mean keyword stuffing. This

process simply involves repeating the keyword as many times as possible on the page, in

order to make it very clear to Google what your website is about. Unfortunately, a lot of

marketers and bloggers went overboard with this strategy and ended up stuffing their

articles and their pages with keywords to the point where they became unreadable. They

were bending over backward to incorporate keywords in awkward and unnatural ways

and the repetition stood out to readers like a sore thumb.

Today then, keyword stuffing will get your website penalized and you’ll show up

nowhere on Google. Instead, you need to keep your focus firmly on the user and their

experience, while just giving Google enough information to know how to index your site.

This means using a low keyword density of around 1-2% in the majority of cases (as

long as it sounds natural). That means that for every 100 or 200 word paragraph, you

should aim to include your keyword at least once.

Meanwhile, Google also now uses more advanced processes to sniff out the subject

matter of a website. These include, for instance, Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI.

What this essentially means, is that Google now looks for pages that include lots of

relevant language around their keywords. This lets Google know what the page is about,

it demonstrates that you know your stuff and it suggests a well-written article.

So if you wrote an article on ‘100 feet’, Google would have to look at words like ‘toes’,

‘ankles’ and ‘foot’ to know that you weren’t talking about height/distance, but rather

about a stampede.

Likewise, you should also make sure to include as many synonyms as possible to

demonstrate your vocabulary. Don’t just write about situations, write about predicaments and scenarios. The key then these days is to focus on writing well and to

use your keywords in a creative manner without making it obvious.

Likewise, try to write lots and to make your articles comprehensive and numerous. By

doing this, you give Google more content to index and you increase your chances of

coming up in any given search. As well as regular keywords, marketers should also aim

to target long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are keywords that occur ‘by accident’

and that are almost emergent properties of your content.

Not every search is going to be for ‘buy hats online’. Some people aren’t really sure about

how to use search engines and they might search something like ‘which is the best hat

shop for buying online’? This is an example of a ‘long tail keyword’ and the chances are

that no-one is targeting it specifically. Google will thus look for reputable sites that

include that long tail keyword, or something close, right in the text. The more text you

have on your website, the greater the chances that the long tail keyword will bring up a

match on your site.

In fact, if you write a lengthy and well-written article and upload it to your website

before you’ve done any real promotion, you can expect it to get about one view a week

from a random long tail keyword. So now imagine if you had 2,000 articles like that.

You’re now looking at 2,000 random long tail keywords landing on your site each week,

even if you don’t do anything else – and chances are that some of those hits will lead to

more hits. As you can see then, content is highly valuable for SEO and even just creating

content in bulk can be a viable strategy to increase traffic, clicks and sales.

Local SEO

Note that some businesses will benefit from targeting specifically ‘local’ keywords. For

instance, if you have a high street store selling hats in Santa Monica and you don’t have

an ecommerce site to go with it, then you might want to target the search term ‘Buy Hats

Santa Monica’. Local SEO like this is highly useful for such companies as it provides

them with a way to reduce competition while more precisely targeting the audience

they’re looking for – people in that area.

What’s more, local SEO will help with local searches that Google can provide based on

GPS information. Adding your business to Google Maps and other local directories (like

Trip advisor) can also help with your local SEO.

Ultimately, local SEO is a very effective tool and can even be used by non-local

businesses in order to build momentum that can subsequently be scaled up. A great

example of a website that used this precise strategy is Facebook. Facebook began life as

a tool exclusively for Harvard students. This then made it exciting and interesting for

local students and meant it wasn’t competing directly with the likes of My Space.

There was a clear selection of ‘local’ routes to market too – parties, Harvard newsletters, clubs

and societies, freshers’ fairs… Then, by the time that Facebook began expanding to other

territories, it already had momentum and it already had people that new users knew on

it.

You can use a similar method by targeting your local area with your new website in the

early days.

In-Bound Links

Another key aspect of SEO is your ‘in-bound links profile’. In-bound links are links

that point at your website and your links ‘profile’ is essentially the way this looks overall.

In-bound links are very important for SEO for a number of reasons. For starters, this is

one of the main ways that Google finds new content: by following links online. Google’s

spiders and robots will ‘crawl’ the web by reading all the content on a web page and then

following the links therein in order to keep moving. If you don’t have any links pointing

at your site, then Google won’t be able to find it and you won’t be added to the index.

What’s more though, Google also views in-bound links as a kind of ‘testimonial’. The

logic goes, that if a website has linked to your website, then it must think your website is

good. The more links you have, the more votes of confidence that is. Likewise, the more

well-regarded the websites linking to you are, the more benefit you’ll get from each link.

One way that a web page or website can be ranked on its importance and performance is

by ‘Page Rank’ or PR. The higher the website’s page rank, the more highly Google

regards it and the more love you’ll get from those links.

On the other hand, note that getting lots of links from spammy websites will ultimately

hurt your own ranking. It’s better to have one link from the BBC or from a .edu domain,

than it is to have a thousand links from sites selling Viagra that are covered in adverts.

Much better.

Google also looks at in-bound links as a way to determine keyword and topic. It does

this by looking at the subject of the page linking to you and also by the ‘anchor text’

(the blue linked text). Again, back when SEO was much simpler, you could simply

request that any website you swapped links with used your keyword as the anchor text.

Unfortunately, this was pretty transparently manipulative to Google and so this can now

also get you penalized. Instead, it’s useful to have a varied and natural selection of

phrases for your anchor text, including the occasional keyword but also the occasional

‘click here’.

Of course if you have paid someone to post your link, or if you have done a swap, then

that’s no longer a testimonial. As such, Google will penalize you for paying for links and

you’ll get penalized if you keep doing link swaps. Creating a ‘blog network’ (where

multiple blogs all agree to link to each other) can also get you into trouble. The aim is to

make it look as though all your links were natural and simply got there because people

loved your content and wanted to share it with the world.

So how do you do this?

How to Build Links

Link building these days can involve a number of different processes. One of the very

best strategies is to do exactly what Google wants and to let your links spread organically

and naturally across the web. All your role is here, is to encourage and facilitate that

happening. You do this by writing what’s known as ‘link bait’ – content that is designed

specifically to encourage people to link to it.

An example of link bait would be an article that provided a ‘resource’ for viewers. A

complete comprehensive overview of a subject for instance would likely get links as this

would be an easy way for people to bring others up-to-speed on your content.

Likewise, controversial articles designed to spark debate can also be considered link

bait, as can anything with a strong social element (‘which Friends character are you’?).

Of course any content that’s really good and outstanding is more likely to be discussed

and shared than boring, derivative content.

Another type of link building is what’s known as guest posting. Here, you write free

content for other blogs and websites and let them use the articles and posts for free. In

exchange, you get a link back to your website in an author box. This way, you get a one way link from a reputed blog and at the same time, you gain access to all the blog’s

regular users. You can even sell affiliate products directly this way.

Using guest posting for SEO is a good strategy but you must be careful not to overdo it.

Matt Cuts, a spokesperson for Google search, has officially stated that using guest

posting too often will also get your site penalized. Again, it’s a little too transparent and

it amounts to gaming the system. Google doesn’t want the most successful website to be

the one with the best contacts!

Finally, you can build links simply by submitting to directories. Actually though, link

directories as they used to exist are far less useful these days than they once were.

Instead, you should look at the more modern equivalent – social bookmarking

sites/content aggregators. These are sites that curate content from around the web,

either by giving voting power to a community, or by using an editor to hand pick the

best topics in a particular subject category.

Either way, Reddit, Digg, All top and Biz Sugar are all examples of places you can submit

your links and then start getting traffic and SEO benefit from it.

Optimization

The last major activity necessary for SEO is optimization. This means optimizing your

website so that it performs well and so the data looks good.

One of the most obvious forms of website optimization is simply to improve load

speeds. The faster your website takes to load, the better it will perform on Google. A

number of factors can help to speed up your load times, from using complex AJAX

coding, to just using smaller image files and reducing the number of plugins and widgets

you use.

Likewise, you also need to ensure that your website is responsive. A responsive web

design means that the website can change shape and size dynamically to suit the size of

device viewing it. Modern websites should be easy to use on a small mobile with a

touchscreen and on a large computer with a mouse and keyboard. You can test this by

going to Google’s ‘mobile friendliness’ tool. If you use a WordPress theme to design your

site (we’ll go into this later) then just make sure ‘responsive design’ is listed among the

features.

Other factors also play a role. For instance, if you have PPC advertising on your website,

then you need to avoid having too many ads on a page which also loses you points.

Having very large images is also bad news as it’s too data intensive. Google likes content

that is being regularly updated and isn’t out of date, it likes websites with a site map and

it likes websites that utilize structured data. This last point means that your website

should include markups that tell Google where the most crucial, bite-sized information

on your website is – things like recipes, dates of events, the date your content was

published etc. This in turn lets Google show ‘rich snippets’ (data rich snippets of your

content right on the SERPs) and lets Google+ answer questions directly. These are likely

to play an increasingly large role in 2016, though you don’t need to worry too much

about them to start with. If you want to make a start though, then just look into adding a

‘structured data plugin’ to WordPress, or learning some of the markups you can add in

yourself. Structured data can also help play a role in local SEO.

Finally, Google also looks at things like bounce rates now. This number describes the

number of visitors that spend a decent amount of time on your website, versus those

who look for a couple of seconds and leave (bounce!). Average pages per visit and the

time spent on each page also play a role. Making sure you keep visitors on your page is

very important then – not to mention for your monetization. If you want to get people to

stay longer on your site, then you simply need to ensure it’s designed well, that it loads

quickly and that it quickly presents some engaging and interesting content. You can also

keep people on your site longer by using ‘suggested posts’ and other techniques to keep

them reading.

A big mistake that small businesses will often make, is to provide some kind of obtuse

service or product and not to very clearly describe what that is on the home page. Often

you’ll come across websites that say things like ‘Synergy! Innovation!’ along the top and

then talk about how they maximize ROI by providing business solutions. When a visitor

reads that, they learn nothing about the company and they are given no incentive to

stick around. People are in a rush these days and they won’t stay on a website if it

doesn’t very clearly and quickly state what its offering. Avoid this mistake!

How to Win at SEO

The secret to success in SEO is simply to align your goals with Google’s. Google wants to

promote the very best content to its users and to connect people with the information

they’re looking for. Ultimately, Google does not serve publishers – it serves users. They

have no incentive and no interest in helping websites to get to the top of the SERPs, they

make their revenue from the people suing the search engines and need to ensure they’re

providing them with the best service possible.

You can try and ‘game’ Google and you can try and stuff your site with keywords. Even if

you don’t get caught out and penalized in the short term though, you will eventually

when Google’s algorithms get smarter.

So with that in mind, how do you go about ensuring your goals are aligned with

Googles? Simple: you work hard to provide your visitors with the very best possible

value. That means writing lots of high quality content and it means building a website

that has the very best optimization and design that’s fun and easy to use for everyone. If

you do this, then not only will Google reward you, but your visitors will reward you by

sharing your link for you. If you do engage in any excessive link building or keyword

stuffing, then make it random and subtle so that it looks organic and not forced.

And finally, it means associating yourself with other websites that are doing the same.

When you’re link building, work hard and focus on getting just a few links from the very

best quality sites – instead of getting thousands of links from smaller websites. If you

can get your link on a well-known blog like Forbes, TechCrunch, The Guardian,

Mashable, MOZ etc., then you’ll get a gigantic boost. And this is just a matter of hard

work and perseverance. Likewise though, you should also look for those ‘up and coming’

websites that are putting in the work and doing all the right things. You’re more likely to

get a link from them as you still have something you can offer in return – but each time

you do, you’ll climb another rung. And if they rise to superstardom they may just have

you in tow when they do!