“What’s the trick to good SEO?” That’s like asking Tiger Woods, “What’s the trick to good golf?” There’s no better trick than steady application of the fundamentals. There’s no loophole to doing it right. Thinking of it like a trick or trying to cut corners will only distract you from truly honest and good SEO.
Everyone tosses around the term like you should know what it is… or if you don’t, you need to get some of it right now: SEO. A lot of people are sitting around thinking, “How do I get more traffic to my site?” There are two main strategies. One is to market it – which usually takes a lot of time and/or money. The second is to get to the top of search results, which takes a lot of know-how, and is what people are referring to when they say those three magic letters. In this article, I’m gonna present the fundamentals of SEO, dispel some of the misconceptions, and give you a common-sense foundation for getting the best possible search result ranking for your site.
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization; in plain English, it means presenting your site in a way that’s easiest for a search engine to understand, and therefore making sure that anyone looking for your content can find it. If your content is the best to fulfill a particular query on Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft search, your page will be seen by a lot more people, even if they’re not looking for you specifically. They might be looking for something similar and discover you totally by chance. There are tons of ways people search these days, far beyond the big 3. People search at millions of sites, and hopefully will someday find you – we want to focus on funneling those visitors to your site.
The search engine is really multiple pieces of software running on a huge, disperse, and practically limitless network of servers. Or it can be just a small subroutine that takes place on your own web host. Or it can be delivered on demand by vendors like Yahoo And Google. In that last case, the search is initiated on your page, sent to another machine, then returned. How does it work and what can we do to get it started? We’re about to get into the nitty-gritty, but it’s by no means a complete education: if you have any of your own recommendations, please post them in the comments below.
The first fundamental thing to understand is that search engines are smart. I hate to admit it, but Google is a heck of a lot smarter than you and I both. Don’t try to fool Google. If you think of SEO as a trick, you’re heading in the wrong direction. Any attempt to game the system will eventually hurt you, if not immediately. And anyone offering to sell you SEO or improve your search rankings is most likely a scam artist. Resist the urge to use these services; reason being, even if they do get you a short-term improvement in rankings, it could potentially result in you being banned from the search engines all together. It’s not worth the risk – you are the foremost expert on your site content, and once you get the right perspective, you can run circles around any purported SEO expert in your specific field of expertise. And without spending a dime.
Of foremost importance is the content. What is your subject matter? For this post, mine is SEO and search engine rankings. For this site as a whole, it’s how to create great a web site. See how I’m peppering in the search terms that I’m targeting? SEO, search engine rankings, and web site? That is search engine optimization in it’s most basic form. In most cases, your subject will be something different, but in all cases, you’ll want to be thinking and writing about it. You have to actually write about what you know, and what people are searching for. You have to structure it in a way that’s easy to pick out the search terms. Don’t get tricky and just repeat the terms over and over – remember, search engines are smart, and they know when you’re trying to trick them. Instead create text that a human would enjoy reading, which includes plenty of the terms you’re focusing on.
Another big component of SEO is the technology. You want the HTML code of your site to be clean and easy to understand under the hood. You want to present the important information clearly, and make sure that every last thing on the page is indexed by the search engine. This includes making sure everything is named consistently, spelled correctly and given an overly neat, carefully laundered, anal retentive attention to detail. You can’t go overboard with good SEO. I will repeat, GOOD SEO – not that all of it is. Overkill is not good. But in the case of technology, you can always make things a little better. A good starting point is to choose the ‘View Source’ option in your browser: this is what a search engine sees. Does the page look vaguely readable and topical, or does it look like a bunch of impenetrable code? Hopefully, the page is still readable, if not beautiful. One thing that helps a lot is the smart application of CSS, instead of the old-school table-based layout. Another thing that helps is keeping your content as text, instead of embedding it in images. Yet another thing you can do is make sure all your images have appropriate and topical file names and ALT tags. Using a good theme and content management system with a focus on SEO can also help a lot. You want a high signal to noise ratio at the source code level.
Inbound linking is the next thing to consider. You want other sites to link to yours – not just any sites, but sites that are related to your topic. You can initiate many of these on your own, by posting to forums, blogs, and directories. Make sure to include a link back to your site, and make the anchor text descriptive of your subject. Don’t spam – doing so will come back to bite you. But do self-promote. Leave a comment with intelligent commentary, that contributes something. Submit your page to all the search engines and directories like DMOZ. Certain blogging systems will submit your posts to search engines automatically, every time you make a change. Also, don’t just focus on .com domains – try to get inbound links from .edu and .gov if you can pull it off. And of course, make sure all your profiles on different sites are linking back to your main homepage.
I once heard a talk by Joe Laratro, president of the South Florida Interactive Marketing Association, and he gave advice in the form of an ‘SEO diet.’ People like the idea of staying in shape, so think of this as keeping your website healthy. A diet is about what you eat, and in that sense, SEO is the vegetable. Your content is the meat. Your job is to try to get people to come eat at your restaurant. How do they find out about your site, what brings them there? It may not actually be a search engine at all. Maybe more people show up from different referral sources, like a business card, or an email forwarded by a friend. And we haven’t even gotten started on what to do once they get there!
Back to the diet analogy. The three suggestions were:
- Post new content at least once a week
- Spend at least one hour per week generating inbound links
- Constantly improve the content and technical presentation
If you do all of these things consistently, you’re bound to increase traffic to your website. But how do you know if it’s working? You need stat tracking software. Most servers automatically log how many visitors come to your site and from where, but it’s very bare bones. If you’re not sure that your server does this, stop reading right now and find out. If you’re not looking at your web traffic statistics on a constant, ongoing basis, there’s no doubt you’re missing out on additional traffic to your site. Some great free stat packages are Google Analytics, StatCounter, and Wordpress.com Stats (if you’re running a wordpress blog).
The last thing I’m gonna talk about today is your domain name and the URL of your page. Look at it objectively. Does it speak to the content you’re writing about? You want the domain name and page name to match your content. http://YourName.com/index2.html really says nothing to a search engine, or to a human being. Look at the URL of this page, and how descriptive it is – http://GetOnlineRight.com/advice/seo-explained-improve-google-search-results.html . You don’t even have to look at the page to know what it’s about, and that will definitely improve your search results.
Alright, I know that was a fairly lengthy introduction, but SEO is a complex topic worth learning about in detail. This post has really only scratched the surface. If I can stress only one thing, it’s to use common sense instead of trying to game the system. Anything you can do to draw people to your site will result in higher search results. So focus inward, and the traffic will follow.