There’s no doubt that SEO can be mystifying, but it doesn’t have to be. There are hundreds of SEO techniques, but once all the jargon is stripped away and you get down to the basic facts, it’s about as complicated as growing an oak tree from an acorn. Sure, there are hundreds of different processes going on underground—behind the scenes, so to speak—but the requirements from you the gardener are basic: plant the seed, weed, feed, and water. SEO is really not much different once you understand some facts.
Search Engine Optimization is the act of engineering your website content so that your pages appear in top positions on a search engine’s results pages when people search for your specific keywords. There are a number of different search engines—Google, Yahoo, Ask—and all of their search algorithms are a little bit different. But there’s no doubt that most people strive for success on Google. Getting the top spots in Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages) brings the largest numbers of targeted traffic to your site, which is what every online business is trying to do.
Here are the top 10 basic SEO techniques that are proven to work.
1. Quality Content is “planting the seed” in that gardening analogy.
Without quality content to begin with, the other techniques that build off of that will be fruitless. Neither search engines nor human visitors will be interested in your site without finding quality information there. A search engine’s stock and trade is information exchange. Visitors search for something you have, and search engines deliver it if it meets their high standards of content. Give it to them and half your battle is already fought and won.
2. Keywords are another part of planting the seed.
It is essential that you do real keyword research to determine what terms people are using to search for what you are offering. There are numerous case studies of business using terms their advertising department throws out as keywords, when the real life human using the Internet is searching for quite a different term. Don’t just trust what you think people are searching for.
Beyond high quality content, keywords are your most valuable tool, so find out as much information as you can regarding what terms are used and how many daily searches are made for those terms. A professional SEO provider can assist you with keyword research, and a number of tools or sites like Wordtracker and Seobook are available for you to do your own research. Many of these tools will not be free, but it’s an expense that is worth it.
Keywords integrate with content, because each page on your site should be optimized for one or two different keywords. These sites should have links to and from other pages on your site. Your link building campaign should target these optimized pages for links to and from other relevant sites. Use the “long tail” approach to keywords, and optimize not only for the top terms, but for the keywords that are less common. These less common keywords will also have less competition.
3. Site Design and general technical consideration is like weeding.
You’re pruning and removing what doesn’t serve you, and letting the best aspects of SEO friendly web design flourish. Reduce the number of clicks it takes to navigate your site. Add a sitemap so engines have no trouble spidering your site and finding everything. Verify your code, and optimize all the details: page titles, descriptions, and all meta tags should include your top keywords.
Your page titles and description is most likely where the search engines will draw the snippet that they display in the results, so have yours make the best impression possible. Keep your punctuation to a minimum in the title by using a pike (I) symbol to separate terms. Make sure your keywords are used evenly throughout the content of the page, from the first line to the last.
4. Optimize for Google, but don’t ignore Yahoo or Ask (MSN).
Use every free tool Google has to offer, from Webmaster Tools to Google Alerts (to monitor new sites containing your keywords) Google Analytics, which is invaluable in understanding your customers.
5. Link Building is the water in our gardening analogy.
Find sites relevant to yours and build a backlink profile to and from these sites. The anchor text (clickable link) from the other site should be related to your keywords. Without links from other sites, your site will not have as much esteem in the eyes of Google, your listings will drop and your customer base will dry up.
6. Article Marketing also will build a platform of success and continue to bring in visitors.
Articles give you links from other sites and help people find you. You establish yourself as the expert in your field by writing short (500 – 700 word) informative articles with links to your sites in the resource box (or your short bio) at the end. There are a number of sites such as SubmitYourArticle and Isnare, among many, that create a distribution network for you. In addition to that, your own blog, comments you leave on other blogs, and RSS feeds that you have set up will enable you to reach a wider audience with your articles. Anything that creates a high quality, trusted link to you, even from other sites such as Squidoo, increases your rankings and traffic.
7. Onsite Traffic Hubs take one of your site’s major themes and create a “hub” around it.
For example, if you sell sports balls on your site, then one separate section would be all about soccer balls. Extensive pages of content would cover covering everything dealing with soccer balls. This is similar to a sub-domain but instead it would be divided into a directory, so your page would be yourdomain/soccer-balls. (It’s fine if you set this up as an underscore rather than a dash. It makes little to no difference from an SEO perspective. But since most links are underlined, the underscore can get lost in that and inexperienced Internet users may mistype the URL.) These types of hubs allow you to create many more optimized pages full of deep links and informative content, which your human visitors will value as much as the spiders will.
8. Set up a WordPress blog.
The WordPress software can be used very effectively for SEO purposes. WordPress is relatively easy to install and use even for a beginner, and is set up to be very search engine friendly. Blogs rank very highly in search engines, and there are may aspects that can be put to good SEO use, such as keyword tags, post titles, and ways to modify the indexable URL names.
9. Social Media Sites like Facebook, and Twitter, and Social Bookmarking/News Sites like Digg, SlashDot, and Technorati are very important on the web, and will be increasingly important as Web 2.0 technology continues to emerge.
These sites are crowded, but being included is better than not being included at all. Yes, joining these sites and using them is time consuming, but to not do it puts you at a distinct disadvantage next to everyone else who is using them.
There are some simple steps to take, such as making sure all of your articles and blogs have social bookmark buttons to make it easy for visitors to bookmark and share your content for you. Everything you do that makes it easier for people to find your site as in the above examples, is fertilizing your website so it can flourish.
10. Don’t stop. It’s not enough to do all of these things once and then stop.
You can rest on your success for a little while but then you will lose it. You will lose your site placement that you worked so hard to build, and you’ll have to start over again to rebuild the customer base you had, so keep going. You don’t put in a garden and water for a month and then quit. Continually strategize new ways to get eyes to your site. Write new articles on a regular basis. Add new pages to your site. Continually monitor and track your keywords. Don’t quit.
Most of all, you must convince yourself that Search Engine Optimization is not difficult. If you think of it in terms of providing high quality content that is easily searchable and logically organized, continually bringing new eyes to your site through marketing efforts and link building, and maintaining an attitude of persistence, it really isn’t much different than that analogy we gave at the beginning: plant the seed, weed, feed, and water. Your site will flourish.
