Do you ever wonder why when you Google something, certain results are listed at the top? Is it a popularity contest? Sort of. Who is choosing which sites come first? The answer is that search engines use complex algorithms to crawl through different websites and links, indexing many so that they can regurgitate them later at the click of a button, returning only those that are relevant to the search ranked in popularity. Although these complex algorithms are pretty on point, they are not as sophisticated as humans. They lack the ability to fully understand every website and its links if the website has not been designed with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. SEO is essentially the practice of improving and promoting a website to increase the number of visitors the site receives from search engines. The majority of your potential leads use search engines to navigate the web, and with millions of different website available, its crucial for your website to be optimized so your potential leads can easily find it. Having higher rankings is critical to your site’s visibility. Being listed at the top not only provides the greatest amount of traffic to your site, but also instils customer trust.
Moz, a great company based out of Seatlle, Washington, specializes in selling software and subscription services specifically for inbound marketing and companies that wish to improve their SEO. They created two great ebooks to give a basic overview of of SEO.
In the first ebook, The Beginner’s Guide to SEO, Moz lays out the essentials to SEO and some of the best practices to utilize when trying to optimize your website. Here are some of the basics from the ebook:
- Make pages for users not engines, because ultimately your user is the more important.
- Have a clear hierarchy with text links.
- Provide useful, information rich sites that accurately describe its content.
- Use keywords to create descriptive, human friendly URLs.
- Market your content so that it will be shared and talked about.
- Your most important content should be in HTML text format.
- Provide alt text for images and transcripts for video/audio files since search engines cannot processes these without supplementing them with text.
A little more about keywords, since they are fundamental for your ranking. You want to ensure that the keywords you wish to rank for are listed at least once in your title, at least two to three times in your main body, at least once in the alt attribute of an image, once in the URL and at least once in the meta description as well. That being said, make sure to not abuse keywords but stuffing as many as possible into your texts, URLs, tags and links. It is also a good idea to search your relevant keywords to see which sites are already ranking highly for those keywords so that your can recognize your competition and identify what they are doing well.
Finally, the best SEO site have the following traits:
- Easy to use, navigate and understand.
- Provide direct, actionable information relevant to the query.
- Professionally designed and accessible to modern browsers.
- Deliver high quality, legitimate, credible content.
Remember to track the success of your SEO efforts using metrics like search engine referrals and conversion rate by search query/term.
We touched very briefly on the concept of linking, which we are going to dive into a little further now. The second ebook by Moz is The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building. Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. Link building is important for SEO because search engines use links to discover new webpages and to help determine how well a page should rank in their results. In other words, the more links you have to your website from other TRUSTED sites, the easier it is for those search engines to find you and the higher up you will be ranked.
In order to get links, you should consider starting a link building campaign which is basically the process of actively trying to increase links to your website. Here are somethings to remember when launching your campaign:
- First, you need to set goals for your campaign that tie in closely with your overall business goals.
- Identify your assets: is it content, data, products, services, your employees etc.?
- What type of links do you need: ones to your homepage, deep pages, brand pages, keyword pages?
- Actively find your target links: what type of people should you contact, who will care enough about your content to actually link it?
- What is your hook: is your content news, funny, controversial, data visualization, competition, ego bait etc?
- Create content, find your angle, do some outreach and always follow up.
Having many links to your website is great, but only if they come from trusted sources. Which is why its important to gauge link building metrics such as domain and page strength. Having links from website with strong domain/page strength will transfer strength to your own website.
Overall, when trying to optimize your website make sure you are only using white hate strategies. These are the ones that are low risk to carry out and fall within search engine’s guidelines. These include:
- Creating your own, unique, insightful content.
- Building genuine, engaged community that interacts with your website and each other.
- Promoting your website through relevant linking.
- Include genuine personalized messages to your audience.
On the other hand, black hat strategies,which violate search engine guidelines by finding loopholes in the search engine’s algorithms to increase your website’s ranking, actually do more harm than good. These include:
- Cloaking: showing different content to search engines than to users.
- Injecting hidden links that you don’t own by exploiting a security flaw.
- Including hidden text that is only shown to search engines.
You can think of black hat strategies like trying out for a basketball team when you are really tall but actually terrible at basketball. You might get picked first because you are so tall but when it comes down to it your team will realize very quickly that you don’t actually have what they were looking for. Then when it’s time to get picked for a soccer team, which you are actually really good at, you won’t get picked at all. That’s because you lost the captain’s trust. Even though you might contain the skills they are looking for this time, they won’t believe you because you previously deceived them. So even though these black hat tactics might get you higher rankings, you will loose the user’s trust and ultimately their traffic. At the end of the day, search engine optimization should be about the users and their experiences and not your website’s rankings.
lucymcqueen 