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You’ve probably heard about SEO, and if you haven’t already, you might get a quick Wikipedia definition of the term, but knowing that SEO is “a process that affects the prominence of a website or web page in a search engine ‘s unpaid results” doesn’t really help you answer important questions about your company and your website, such as:

• How do you, for your site or your company’s site, “optimize” for search engines?
• How do you know how much time to spend on SEO?
• How can you differentiate “good” SEO advice from “bad” or harmful SEO advice?

What’s probably interesting to you as a business owner or employee is how you can actually use SEO to help drive more traffic, leads, sales, and eventually revenue and profit for your company. That’s what we’re going to focus on in this introduction, brought exclusively to you by www.websitesadvice.com. Are you good to go? Let’s just get to it!

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE ABOUT SEO?

Lots and lots of people are looking for stuff. This traffic can be extremely powerful for a company, not only because there is a lot of traffic, but also because there is a lot of very specific, high-intent traffic. If you’re selling blue widgets, will you prefer to buy a billboard so that someone with a car in your region can see your ad (whether they’re really interested in blue widgets or not) or turn up every time someone in the world is buying blue widgets in a search engine? Perhaps the latter, because they have a commercial purpose, which means they ‘re standing up and saying they want to buy something you’re selling.

People are looking for any kind of thing that is directly related to your business. Beyond that, your prospects are also looking for all kinds of things that are only loosely related to your business. They represent even more opportunities to connect with these people and help them answer their questions, solve their problems, and become a reliable resource for them.

Are you more likely to get your widgets from a trusted resource that has provided great information each of the last four times you’ve turned to Google for troubleshooting, or someone you’ve never heard of?

WHAT ACTUALLY WORKS FOR DRIVING TRAFFIC FROM SEARCH ENGINES?

First of all, it is important to note that Google is responsible for most of the search engine traffic in the world (though there is always some movement in the actual numbers). This may vary from niche to niche, but it is likely that Google is the dominant player in the search results that your company or website would like to see, and the best practices outlined in this guide will help you position your site and its content to rank in other search engines as well.

No matter what search engine you use, the search results are constantly changing. In particular, Google has recently updated a number of stuffs about how websites are classified by a lot of different animal names, and many of the simplest and cheapest ways to bring the pages listed in search results have become incredibly risky in recent years. So, what’s working? How does Google decide which pages to return in response to what users are searching for? When are you going to get all this important traffic to your site?

Google’s algorithm is extremely complex, and I’ll share some links for anyone looking to get deeper into how Google ranks sites at the end of this section, but at an extremely high level:

§  Google is looking for pages that contain high – quality, relevant query information.

§  We decide the importance of “crawling” (or reading) the content of your website and evaluate (algorithmically) whether that information is applicable to what the searcher is searching for, often based on the keywords it contains.

§  They assess “price” by a number of means, but the number and quality of other websites that connect to your page and your site as a whole remains popular among them. Simply put, if the only sites that connect to your blue widget site are blogs that no one else on the web has linked to, and my blue widget site gets links from reputable sources that are often linked to, like CNN.com, my site will be more reliable (and presumed to be of higher quality) than yours.

Increasingly, additional elements are being weighed by Google’s algorithm to determine where your site will rank, such as:

§  How do people engage with your site (Do they find the information they need and remain on your site, or go back to the search page and click on another link? Or do they simply ignore your search results list and never click?)

§  Your site’s loading speed and “mobile friendliness”

§  How much unique content you have (against very “thin” low – value content or duplicate content)

There are hundreds of ranking factors that Google considers in response to searches, and they are constantly updating and improving their process.

The good news is, you don’t have to be a search engine expert to rate useful words in search results. We ‘re going through established, repeatable best practices for optimizing search websites that can help you drive targeted traffic via search without trying to reverse engineer the core competence of one of the world’s most valuable companies.

Now, back to the basics of SEO! Let’s get into the actual SEO tactics and strategies that will help you get more traffic from your search engines.

KEYWORD RESEARCH AND KEYWORD TARGETING BEST PRACTICES

The first step in search engine optimization is simply to decide what you’re really optimizing for. This means identifying the phrases people are searching for (also known as “keywords”) that you want your website to rank in search engines such as Google. Sounds simple enough, huh? I want my widget business to show up when people are looking for “widgets” and maybe when they type in stuff like “buy widgets.”

 It’s not that easy, unfortunately. There are a few key factors to be taken into account when determining keywords that you want to address on your site:

§  SEARCH VOLUME – The first factor to consider is how many people (if any) are actually looking for a keyword. The more people there are looking for a keyword, the larger the market you stand to meet. Conversely, if no one is looking for a keyword, there is no audience available to search for your content.

§  RELEVANCE – If a term is frequently searched for, that’s perfect: so, what if it’s not entirely relevant to your prospects? Relevance seems straight-forward at first: if you’re selling business email marketing automation software, you don’t want to show up for searches that don’t have anything to do with your company, like “pet supplies.” But what about terms like “email marketing software?” Intuitively, this might seem like a great description of what you’re doing, but if you’re selling to Fortune 100 companies, most of the traffic for this very competitive term will be searchers who don’t have any interest in buying your software (and people you want to reach might never buy your expensive, complex solution based on a simple Google search). Conversely, you might think that a tangential keyword like “best enterprise PPC marketing solutions” is completely irrelevant to your business as you don’t sell PPC marketing software. But if your prospect is a CMO or a marketing director, getting in front of them a useful resource to test pay – per – click tools could be a great “first step” and a great way to start a partnership with a prospective buyer.

§  COMPETITION – As with any business opportunity, you want to weigh potential costs and the likelihood of success in SEO. For SEO, this means understanding relative competition (and likelihood of ranking) for specific terms.

First, you need to consider who your prospective customers are and what they ‘re likely to be looking for. If you don’t understand who your prospects are, thinking about that is a good place to start, for your business in general, but also for SEO.

From there you want to understand:

§  What types of things are they interested in?

§  What problems do they have?

§  What type of language do they use to describe the things that they do, the tools that they use, etc.?

§  Who else are they buying things from (this means your competitors, but also could mean tangential, related tools – for the email marketing company, think other enterprise marketing tools)?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have an initial “seed list” of possible keywords and domains to help you get additional keyword ideas and set up some search volume and competition metrics. Take a list of key ways your prospects and customers explain what you’re doing, and start inputting them into keyword tools like Google’s own keyword tool, or tools like Uber Suggest.

You can find a more comprehensive list of keyword tools below, but the main idea is that in this initial step, you will want to run a number of searches with a variety of different keyword tools. You can also use competitive keyword tools like SEM Rush to see how your rivals’ rate. These tools look at thousands of different search results, and they’ll show you every search term your competitor ‘s recent ranking in Google. Here’s what SEM Rush reveals to Marketing Automation Provider Marketo:

Again: this doesn’t just have to be something you’re searching for a rival. You may look at related tools that sell content ideas to the same audience, and even look at the big niche websites that talk about your topic (and that your prospects are reading) and see what kind of keywords these sites are driving traffic. In addition, if you have an existing site, you are likely to get some traffic from search engines already. If this is the case, you can use some of your own keyword data to help you understand which words are driving traffic (and which you might be able to rank a bit better for).

Unfortunately, Google has stopped providing a lot of information about what people are looking for from analytics providers, but you can use SEM Rush (or similar tools, such as SpyFu) on your own platform to get a sense of the words you rate and their approximate search volume. Google also makes more of these data available in its free Webmaster Tools app (if you haven’t set up an account, this is a very useful SEO tool for both unraveling search query data and diagnosing various technical SEO issues –more on the Webmaster Tools set up here).

When Webmaster Tools is set up, you can navigate to this page when logged in and see the search queries that drive traffic to your site:

ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION

Once you have your keyword list, the next step is actually to apply your targeted keywords to the content of your site. -page on your site should have a key word and a “basket” of related terms. In his description of the perfectly optimized page, Rand Fishkin offers a nice view of what a well (or perfectly) optimized website looks like:

Let’s look at a few critical, simple on-page features that you’ll want to understand when you think about how to drive search engine traffic to your website:

Title Tags

While Google is working to better understand the actual meaning of a website and to de-emphasize (and even punish) the offensive and misleading use of keywords, including the term (and related terms) that you want to place on your sites, is still important. And the single most powerful place you can put your keyword is the title tag of your post.

The title tag is not the primary title of your website. The title you see on the page is usually an H1 (or probably an H2) HTML element. The title tag is what you can see at the top of your browser, and the source code of your page is contained in the meta tag:

The length of the title tag that Google will view will vary (it’s based on pixels, not character counts) but in general 55 – 60 characters is a reasonable thumb rule. If possible, you want to function in your keyword, and if you can do it in a normal and compelling way, make a few related changes to that phrase as well. Keep in mind though: the title tag is often what a searcher sees in the search results of your website. It’s the “headline” in the results of an organic search, and you also want to take into account how clickable the title tag is.

Meta Descriptions

While the title tag is essentially the headline of your search listing, the meta description (another meta HTML item that can be changed in your site’s code but is not seen on your actual page) is basically an additional ad copy of your site. Google has some freedoms in what it shows in the search results, and your meta description does not always show, but if you have a clear explanation of your website that will make people more likely to click, you will significantly increase traffic. (Remember: showing up in the search results is just the first step! You still need to get the searchers to come to your site and actually take the action you want to take.)

Body Content

Of course, the actual content of the page itself is very important. Different types of pages will have different “work”–your key content asset that you want a lot of people to connect to needs to be very different from your help content that you want to make sure your users find and get a quick answer.

Alt Attributes

Where you mark your pictures will affect not only the way your page is viewed by search engines, but also how much image search traffic your site generates. The alt attribute is an HTML element that allows you to provide alternate image information if the user cannot display the image. Your images can break over time (files will be deleted, users will have difficulty connecting to your site, etc.) so providing a useful picture description can be helpful from a general usability perspective. This also offers you another opportunity –outside of your content – to help search engines understand what your page is all about.

URL Structure

The URL structure of your site can be important both from a control point of view (you can more effectively segment data in reports using a segmented, structured URL structure) and from a sharing point of view (shorter, succinct URLs are easier to copy and paste and tend to be less regularly disrupted by mistake). Again: don’t work with as many keywords as you can; create a short, succinct URL.

Schema & Markup

Finally, once you’ve taken care of all the usual on-page functionality, you might consider taking a step further and allowing Google (and other search engines that also know the schema) to understand your page. The Schema markup does not make your website appear higher in search results (it is not actually a ranking factor). It does offer your listing some extra “real estate” in your search results, the way ad extensions do for your Google Ads (formerly known as AdWords) ads.

In some search results, if no one else uses schema, you can get a good click-through rate advantage because your site shows things like ratings while others don’t. In other search results, where everyone uses a schema, comments may be “table stakes” and you may be damaging your Google CTR by omitting:

There are a variety of different types of markup that you can include on your site –most likely won’t apply to your company, but it is likely that at least one form of markup will apply to at least some of your site’s pages.

INTERNAL LINKING AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

The Information Architecture refers to the way you arrange the pages on your website. The way you arrange your website and the relation between your pages can have an effect on how specific content on your site ranks in response to your searches. The explanation for this is that search engines generally view links as “voices of trust” and a way of helping to understand both what a page is about and how important it is (and how trustworthy it should be).

Search engines often look at the actual text you use to connect to pages, called anchor text–using descriptive text to link to a page on your site helps Google understand what that page is about (but especially in the post-Penguin world, be careful not to be overly aggressive in cramming your keywords to link text). Just as a CNN link suggests that your site might be relevant, if you connect to a specific page aggressively from various areas of your site, that’s an indicator to search engines that that particular page is very important to your site. In addition: the pages on your site that have the most external votes (links from other, trusted sites) have the most power to help other pages on your site rank search results.

LINK BUILDING AND CONTENT MARKETING

Because Google’s algorithm is still largely based on links, getting a number of high-quality links to your site is obviously incredibly important in driving the search traffic: you can do all the research you want on the on-page and technical SEO, if you don’t have links to your site, you won’t appear in the search results listings.

There are a number of ways to get links to your site, but as Google and other search engines become increasingly sophisticated, many of them have become extremely risky (even if they may still work in the short term). If you’re new to SEO and are trying to exploit the platform, these riskier and more aggressive ways to try to get links are unlikely to suit your company, because you won’t know how to navigate the pitfalls properly and assess the risks. In addition, trying to create ties deliberately to manipulate Google rankings does not generate any other value for your business in the event that search engine algorithms change and your rankings vanish. A more sustainable approach to connection building is to focus on more common, sustainable marketing approaches, such as creating and promoting useful content that also contains specific terms that you would like to rank and participate in traditional PR for your company.

WHAT ARE THE BEST SEO PRACTICES AND COMMON TECHNICAL ISSUES?

Although SEO’s fundamentals like the most effective ways to build links to search engine rankings have changed in recent years (and content marketing has become increasingly important), what many people would consider more “traditional SEO” is still incredibly valuable in generating traffic from search engines. As we have already addressed, keyword research is still important, and technical SEO problems that prevent Google and other search engines from understanding and ranking site content are still prevalent. Technical SEO for larger, more complex sites is indeed a discipline of its own, but there are some common mistakes and issues that most sites face that even smaller to mid – sized companies would profit from being aware of:

Page Speed

Search engines are increasingly focusing on fast-loading sites –good news is that this is not only helpful for search engines, but also for users and conversion rates on your site. In fact, Google has created a useful tool here to send you some specific suggestions as to what to alter to fix page speed problems on your web.

Mobile Friendliness

When your site is driving (or could be driving) substantial search engine traffic from mobile searches, how “web friendly” your site is will affect your ranking on mobile devices, which is a fast – growing category. Mobile traffic also outweighs mobile traffic in some niches.

Header Response

Header response codes are an important technical issue for SEO. If you are not especially technical, this may be a complex subject (and again more comprehensive tools are mentioned below), but you want to make sure that the working pages display the correct code to the search engines (200) and that the pages that are not found also return the code to show that they are no longer present (404). Getting these codes incorrect will inform Google and other search engines that the “Page Not Found” page is actually a working page, which makes it look like a small or redundant page, or worse: you can tell Google that all of your site’s content is simply 404s (so that none of your pages are indexed and qualified for ranking). You can use the site header checker to see the status codes that your pages return when search engines crawl.

Redirects

Improperly implementing redirects on your site may have a significant impact on the results of your search. Whenever you can prevent this, you want to avoid moving the contents of your site from one URL to another; in other words: if your website is on example.com/page, and that domain gets search engine traffic, you want to avoid moving all the contents to example.com/different-url/newpage.html, unless there is an extremely strong business reason that would outweigh any possible short – term or even long – term reasons. If you need to transfer content, you want to make sure that you enforce permanent (or 301) redirects to content that is moving permanently, because temporary (or 302) redirects (which are often used by developers) suggest to Google that the change may not be permanent and that they should not shift all the equity and ranking power to the new URL.

Duplicate Content

Thin and duplicated content is another topic of Google’s latest Panda update. By duplicating content (putting the same or near-identical content on multiple pages), you dilute the link equity between two pages instead of concentrating it on one page, giving you less chance of ranking competitive phrases with sites that aggregate their link equity into a single document. Having a large amount of duplicated content makes your site look like it is cluttered with lower – quality (and possibly manipulative) content in the eyes of search engines.

XML Sitemap

XML site maps can help Google and Bing understand your site and find all of its contents. Only make sure you don’t include pages that aren’t important, and remember that uploading a page to a search engine on a sitemap doesn’t make sure that the page really ranks for anything. There are a number of free resources available to generate XML site maps.

Robots.txt, Meta NoIndex, & Meta NoFollow

Finally, you can tell the search engines how you want them to treat other content on your site (for example, if you want them not to crawl a specific section of your site) in the robots.txt file. This file currently already exists for your site at your site.com/robots.txt. You want to make sure that this file doesn’t actually block anything that you want the search engine to find from being added to their database, and you can also use the robots file to keep things like staging servers or thin or redundant contents that are useful for internal use, or to keep customers from being indexed to search engines. You can use meta noindex and meta nofollow tags for similar purposes, although each feature is different from the other.

THAT’S A LOT ON INFORMATION. WHAT TO DO FIRST?

So, you’ve gotten this far, you should know a lot about how search engines classify websites and how you can place your own site and company to attract more search traffic from search engines like Google.

PRIORITIZE. No platform does the perfect job against every single aspect of search engine optimization. Think about the things that you do well, have budget and resources for, and that will give your business the best return on investment–it will be at least slightly different for every business and site. If you’re great at creating and promoting content, determine which keywords to follow and focus your efforts there. If you have a large and complex site, be sure to get the technical SEO right (or hire someone who can).

If you’re a small business that would benefit from a ranking for very specific geo-focused terms but not much else, strengthen your local SEO efforts (and then perhaps focus on other marketing efforts once you start to see a declining return from your efforts there).

Always remember that the ultimate goal of any search engine optimization effort is to increase the exposure and traffic for your company or your site’s content. Look for ways that search engine traffic can help your business and site: don’t just search for the latest SEO buzzwords or leap every time Google makes a suggestion that could boost your search ranking while damaging your overall business.

Thank you so much for joining us in this first installment of SEO SERIES by WebsitesAdvice. Stay tuned for more contents regarding Search Engine Optimization so we can help your business improve its visibility in search engines.

See you next time!