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SEO Basics: Pages vs. Website

A common myth about SEO is that you are optimizing your “Web Site”.

“How does my site rank on Google?” is really a misnomer.  

You are optimizing page by page.  Search Engines care about the specific page on your website, not the site as a whole

Now, you can definitely use your site’s structure to promote different pages and “lift selected pages up” in the eyes of the search engine. 
For example, if your home page ranks well – in terms of Page Rank and Search Engine Position – you can use that to your advantage to drive some of that “ranking” or “Google love” to other pages on your site.  So, it’s not to say that the pages on your site each live in a vacuum.  But when you are looking to optimize for various terms, you need to focus your attention page by page.

 

 

SEO Basics: What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is the art and science of convincing the Search Engines that you are the most relevant option to display to their customers in a search.

This involves strategically designing your site and your pages to clearly position their relevance.  And it involves getting other sites to identify you as relevant.
The components of SEO are actually fairly basic:

1. On Page factors - Keyword placement & density
2. Site Structure - Navigation, organization and spider-friendly factors
3. Off Page factors  - Number and quality of inbound links - Consensus among the inbound links as to what your page is about.

These SEO basics all come together to serve 3 major goals:

1. Tell the Search Engine what your page is about
2. Make it easy for the Search Engines to index your site
3. Tell the Search Engines what Other Sites think your page is about.

 

PPC vs. SEO

Should you focus your attention on PPC or SEO? 

How about Both?! 

The best SEO strategy starts with a PPC campaign. 

Why?

No matter how much keyword research you do on the front end, you have no idea, really, which keywords will work for your business.  Which ones bring the most traffic based on your offer? And most importantly, which ones CONVERT?

Running a PPC campaign before you begin your SEO efforts is a surefire way to find out the answers to your most important online marketing questions:  

• How is my target market looking for what I offer?
• What kind of offer will they respond to?

Create your PPC campaigns based on your keyword research and refine them until you have your answers.  Then, take the highest converting, most expensive keywords and optimize your site to rank for these keywords.  This method will save you from optimizing your site from non-converting keywords and will save you money on PPC when you start ranking organically for the expensive keywords.

 

The Truth about Social Marketing

Social Marketing. It’s all the buzz.  Everyone’s doing it. 

Some say with Social Marketing, SEO is dead . . . ???

NOT!

SEO will never die unless the Search Engines themselves die.   (never say never . . .)

SEO = Search Engine Optimization = Optimizing your page/site/video to be presented when a user searches for what you are offering.

What IS changing and will continue to change are the methods you need to use to appear relevant to Google for the search in question.  Google’s mission is to create algorithms that can provide the most relavant results to their visitors.

In the beginning, you used to be able to just “tell” Google “My Site is About This” – then they figured out we could just make that up - (keyword stuffing anyone? )

Then you could make Google think “everyone likes me”.  Paid links, reciprocal link exchanges.  Again, they figured it out.

Social Marketing is the most recent method that Google can and does use to figure out what the masses are thinking about and finding useful.

This is why social media is becoming such a popular topic in the SEO world.  Social Media has some great PR and general marketing benefits, but Google also recognizes that there is a lot of power in understanding what the populations within the social networks are finding relevant and interesting.

And as with all SEO techniques: Use it wisely. Don’t try to "game" Google.  And it will be a useful and powerful technique for you.

 

Simply SEO

Understanding SEO and How to succeed with Optimizing your website is actually very simple. 

SEO is about understanding Google’s Goal. 

So What is Google’s Goal?  To present the most relevant information to their visitor so their visitors come back for more again and again.

In order to present the most relevant search results, Google is looking at two major clues about you:

1. What is Your Page About?
2. Do Others Agree?

Now it all comes together: These two topics relate to the main steps in SEO: 

1. On-page Optimization (What is your page about?)
2. Link Building (Do Others Agree?)

It also helps you to understand why certain tactics come and go.  When faced with a new “sure-fire” SEO tactic, ask yourself: Are you trying “fool” the search engines to a. believe your site is about a certain topic or b. believe others agree? 

You can count on the fact that Google will work very hard to prevent anything that jeopardizes their ability to present the most relevant results.

Just Look at some of the old tactics that used to work – keyword tag stuffing, paid links, etc.

Now all that said, you still need to compete with the companies that are using these tactics.  What is one to do?  Just understand the underlying concepts, use “tactics” carefully – completely understanding the consequences and know that Google is a lot smarter than we are and any tactics your less-than-ethical competition are using will not build their traffic for the long term.

 

Is Your Site Getting Votes But Wasting Traffic?

One of the most important ways to optimize your site and get good rankings with search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN is to get links coming into your site. Think of links to your site as votes — if you have a lot of links coming to you, that says “this site is important”. And common SEO practice is to create inbound links for many different keywords from several types of sites - the more popular the better.

But . . . once visitors arrive at your site, it can’t throw away that traffic by not being structured correctly. And although your content should mention your keywords, it can’t be so keyword dense that it’s written for machines.

A simple analogy is through word-of-mouth getting a lot of people excited about coming to a store grand opening for a shoe boutique and when crowds of people arrive they discover you’re a clothing store with a rack of shoes in the back. If you’ve got links relevant to shoes, then make sure your site sells plenty of shoes.