5 Essential Things You Need to Know About SEO to Have an Effective Website
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a hot topic right now. Everyone is wondering how to get a website to “rank”, to be one of the top results when someone enters a term in a search engine. Most small businesses need a web presence of some kind. A healthy web presence is essential so that your customers or potential customers can find you. The higher you rank, the easier you are to find (people really just don’t scroll down past the top results!).
SEO can be complicated, but understanding these essential truths about SEO will go a long way to helping you to maximize your website for search.
#1: You Can’t Trick the Algorithm, Google is Smarter than you
Search Engine Optimization is a collection of strategies designed to help you to rank higher in searches. SEO strategies are usually divided into two categories; White hat, or good strategies which can take a long time and are based on understanding how people search, and Black hat, or strategies which attempt to trick or manipulate search engines. Black Hat strategies, in addition to being shady and dubious, also DON’T WORK. If an idea seems sneaky, or too good to be true, or in any way dishonest, then don’t bother. Such strategies include: hiding superflous keywords in white text (so they aren’t visible to the naked eye), link farms, link exchanges, anything that you don’t earn by providing a quality product or content. Not only is Google smart enough not to give you credit for these sneaky tactics, this kind of behavior can actually get you banned on google, which means your website wont show up at all.
#2: Pick Good Keywords
Choosing SEO keywords is all about understanding how people search. Imagine I am someone who wants to find you. What would I enter in a search box if I was looking for you? Imagine a circumstance where I am looking for something, find your website and then become completely ecstatic that I found you… What keywords would I have entered? Understanding how people search is the heart of white hat SEO. Your keywords are the root of that understanding. Using only your keywords, could people understand what your mission is/what your business does? SEO is all about helping people find you, and knowing what they are searching for is the first step for SEO.
#3: On Page Optimization requires a professional web designer
Any tactic worth doing is worth doing right. SEO On page factors are those factors that live on your website which you can control. Things like meta tags, URL structure, site directory navigation, and anchor text. If you don’t know what these things are, you are not alone. These are not simple, do it yourself, concepts to implement in a web page design. There is a reason that people go to school and get degrees in computer science and engineering to be able to build websites. Get a professional to set up your site so that it’s done right, the first time.
#4: The most important place to put your keywords is in the title in the <head> tag
In fact, this may be the most important text on your entire website. If you don’t know what this means, see #3 above.
#5: At the end of the day, SEO is all about inbound links
When you talk about search engine optimization it’s important to understand that the Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing want to provide the searcher with the best results for their search query.
That’s their business. And how they compete is by providing people who search for them with the best possible results for their search.
How do they decide who’s site is “the best”? Google was created by two Stanford grad students. They based their evaluation of websites on the same structure that thesis papers are evaluated.
Let’s say 2 people write graduate theses on the same subject. One get’s referenced/cited (essentially “linked back to”) 1,000 times and the second is referenced 10,000 times, who’s is the best? The obvious answer is the second one. The one referenced the most is better, more relevant, higher quality etc. The foundation of most search engines is the idea that the one gets referenced or on the internet, linked back to, more is “better” and should therefore rank higher for that search term. Now that you have your keywords, you need to focus on getting inbound links. The more links the higher you will rank.
But not all links are created equal. What you really want are links which point from that keyword to your website. This is quite possibly the most important step people miss when they start looking for links. If possible you want that outreach to get you a link that looks like this: accounting software… not this: Workingpoint (you should hopefully already rank for your own name!).
With these 5 essential pieces of knowledge, you should be ready to start thinking about developing an SEO strategy for your website. SEO doesn’t produce overnight results, but when done right, can be an important and cost effective alternative to pay per click advertising.
About the Author: Dena Stern is the Community Resources and Marketing Manager at WorkingPoint, a financial accounting tool for Small Businesses. She is responsible for community outreach and is a frequent contributor on the subject of technology trends, social media, SEO and marketing on the WorkingPoint Blog.
Photo Credit: Igor ™
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I have to disagree with point 3 and 5. On page optimisation requires a professional copywriter not a designer. As an SEO copywriter I’m responsible for writing the page titles, the anchor text, the description tags (not for SEO purposes but for ‘clickability’ from the SERPs) and the copy. Any word stuff should always be written by a copywriter not a designer.
Secondly, SEO is not “all about inbound links” otherwise no-one would do any on page optimisation at all! Links are hugely important though and a link campaign should be an integral part of your website marketing plan.
The best inbound links you can get are located within content and include the target pages’s keyword in the link’s anchor text. You usually get those links when someone talks about your page on the web, in blogs, forums and on their websites, possibly in form of a referral.
A big mistake a lot of new site masters and bloggers especially make is thinking that you can hurry your SEO by creating tons of content.
I always tell people: At least 80% of your SEO efforts should be happening off the site – namely, building links.
Great article.
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I agree that a lot of SEO is about inbound links, but I’m a firm believer that you really need to focus on your On-Page SEO just as much as you do your Off-Page SEO. Think about it – You can have all of the links in the world to your website, but if your meta tags are formatted horribly (title, keywords and description), your rankings could suffer. Always make sure that your On-Page SEO is up to par and that every page of your website that you want indexed is optimized to its fullest potential for the best results.
Interesting article, although I disagree with #5. SEO is mostly about inbound links but not totally. A good SEO campaign has a number of factors, and inbound links are one of them.
I agree with the comments above – whilst link building is a critical part of SEO, the importance of the on-page strategy cannot be forgotten.
Often making lots of on-page changes can get websites (at least niche, local ones) to the top of the SERPs very quickly. Link building will just reinforce this.