This is the powerpoint from last Friday's presentation of “Demystifying SEO.” The purpose of this seminar is to correct the misinformation many companies, both ethical and scammers, will try to sell you. Everyone hears little bits of information and tries to trick search engines. They may work for the short term, but in the long run these techniques will end up costing you money and site traffic.
How a Search Engine Works
Search engines index pages throughout the internet. They use automated “spiders” that crawl the internet from page to page and keeps a copy of whatever it finds in their own database or “index”. Using their own proprietary algorithms, search engines filter through their index and determine the relevance or “rank” of pages based on what key words or phrases are searched. All this happens in a fraction of a second and you get a list of the most likely pages you're searching for.
In previous years, it was fairly easy to guess what those algorithms were and exploit it. For example, keyword density (the numbers of key words as a proportion of the text of the page) used to be weighed heavily. People would overload their pages with keywords and variations, some of which may have nothing to do with the site. As a consequence, search results wouldn't be accurate and search engine users wouldn't be satisfied. The algorithms used get more and more complicated to battle people trying to manipulate results. It's become a continuous cat and mouse game as Internet marketers try to outsmart search engines to get their pages, or their clients' pages, to the top of search results. Over time search engines stopped simply “searching,” like how you'd search for a word in a document, and started “suggesting” pages that you might be looking for.
Most search engines make their money by selling paid advertising space, which usually show up above the actual search results and to the right. The goal of SEO is to get your pages listed in the “organic” section, as highlighted below. What scammers will do is try to sell you “Guaranteed #1” placement in search engines like Google, but in reality it's their pay-per-click service (Adwords).
What Search Engine Optimization Isn't
There's a lot of confusion about what SEO is and isn't. Here's a short breakdown of what it isn't.
- SEO is not a quick fix. It can take up to months to see any significant changes take place. However, some of the changes that you can make are fairly quick, like assigning unique page titles to each of your pages with the <title> tag
- SEO is not a one time thing. For best results, you'll want to track changes and progress and make adjustments as needed. There's always new changes, so you'll want to update your site when they happen. It's something you should monitor at least on a weekly basis.
- SEO is not directly related to your site traffic. The number of visitors to your site is not directly related to improving your search engine rankings. However, more traffic may mean you're more likely to get some links from users who like your site (more on this below).
- SEO is not about dirty tricks. If anyone has told you about “tricks” they know to get your site to show up for particular searches, they're doing you a disservice. Search engines have become smarter and penalize you for things like hidden text (white text on a white background, for example), paid links, domain forwarding, and falsified domain registrations.
- SEO is no big secret. Good techniques can be found all over the internet, and often straight from the source. There's tons of blogs and forums where people discuss best practices and tips. You just need to have time to do it yourself or money to hire a company to do it for you.
What SEO Is
- SEO is a combination of planning and execution. Before starting on your campaign, you'll want to do research, set goals, and lay out a plan. To execute it well you'll need to dedicate some time or delegate tasks, then monitor results.
- SEO is a long term project. Don't expect immediate results. It can takes weeks to months to see any improvement.
- SEO is doable by anybody. You don't need a degree or special training to work on your campaign.
- SEO is constantly changing. Search engines update their algorithms all the time, so you'll want to stay on top of changes and trends to keep your site competitive.
Tips to get you started
This is a list of generally accepted principles of a solid SEO campaign. By no means is this a complete guide, but it covers the basics and should get you interested in doing some more research.
- Content is King. Unique, well-written content is going to be the driving force for any SEO campaign. By unique, I mean it's not copied from other websites or duplicated throughout your site. By having good content with your targeted keywords or phrases, search engines tend to think your page is more relevant to what people may be searching for. As a byproduct of having good content, visitors are also more likely to want to share it with their friends by posting it to social media sites or their own blogs/website, generating a link back to your site.
- Link building. Getting quality links back to your website from other websites is probably one of the most powerful techniques and heavily weighed. Each “backlink” from other sites is like a vote for your site, indicating you have a quality website. The more links the better, but be careful about linking from low quality, non relevant websites. Good places to start are directory type of websites that allow you to submit your site.
- Site Structure. Good site structure means there's a clear hierarchy of your pages and your site is organized in a logical manner. Try to avoid complex javascript based menus in favor of HTML/CSS menus. It's easier to maintain and easier for search engines to find your pages.
For example, if you were a car dealer, you would have a structure as follows:
- Home
- New Cars
- Sedans
- Trucks
- SUVs
- Used Cars
- Sedans
- Trucks
- SUVs
- Financing
- Financing Options
- Loan Application
- Contact
- Market research. Know your competitors, then know yourself. Find out which sites are showing up for your target keywords and analyze what they're doing.
- You can get stats like in-bound or backlinks by doing running a query for link:domain.com in Google.
Example - You can check out how many pages are indexed by running site:domain.com
Example - Do a search for any of your target words or phrases and see what position your site shows up compared to others. Use this as your benchmark for how well your campaign is doing over time.
- You can get stats like in-bound or backlinks by doing running a query for link:domain.com in Google.
- Keyword research. It's one thing to be found for a keyword. It's another thing entirely to be found for more competitive words and phrases. You can use Google's keyword suggester to give you some insight into search volumes and competition. Some niches you can try to target are highly searched but low competition words that are related to your site.
- On Page Optimization. This refers to how each individual page is constructed.
- You'll want to have the basics like unique <title> and <h1> tags on each page. The text in this tag should be something descriptive about your page, not simply the name. For example, instead of just “Our Services”, it should be “Our Web Design Services”.
- If you images, you should add the “alt” attribute and provide a description of the image. Since search engines can't fully understand images yet, the alt tag helps identify your iFor example, if you were selling a car, the code should look like:
<img src=”images/car.jpg” alt=”2002 Toyota Celica Silver” />
- Viral Marketing. Make it as easy as possible to share your page with other people. This isn't directly related to SEO, but it usually leads to people posting links to their blogs or other websites, getting you those valuable backlinks.
- Measure your results. Google and many other sites offers tools to check your page rank compared to others. We primarily use Google Analytics to see what keywords are effective in getting traffic. A quick search online will find you some applications you can download to check your site against others for specific terms. (Note: We do not endorse any particular software. Use at your own discretion).
- Keep up to date. Attend seminars, read blogs, browse forums. There's tons of information at your fingertips.
What to watch out for
If you are considering professional help, we have some general tips to protect you and your checkbook. If it sounds too good to be true or if there's any hesitation explaining exactly what you're getting, you should immediately look elsewhere:
- There's no “guarantee” in search engine optimization. Nobody has any special relationship with Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo. You can't purchase top organic placement and there's certainly no guarantee anybody can do it (ethically or long term).
- Avoid companies that have “secret” or “exclusive” techniques. These are likely to get your site removed from search engines and you'll waste a lot of time.
- Don't confuse SEO for paid search (Pay-per-click ads) services. Remember that organic and paid results are two different things. Both have their merits. Just know what you're getting.
- Do not respond to any spam emails. If you receive emails out of the blue about SEO services, they're most likely scammers or non-ethical. Don't waste your time.
- Avoid companies that own shadow domains. These are domains that are optimized for particular words and phrases, which then get redirected to your site. The content of the site is usually nonsense so it ends up being worthless as a real site and will eventually get your site penalized.
- Don't get sold on long or obscure phrases. You're likely to get ranked for these anyway if you followed the advice above.
Search engines get smarter and smarter every day about weeding out common tricks and dirty techniques. The bottom line is: If you're not proud of the way you're getting traffic to your site, you shouldn't do it. It can be detrimental to your brand and your business. Worst case scenario, it will get you banned from search engine indexes altogether.
Additional Reading
If you have any questions about this presentation, leave a comment below or contact us. We'd love to see you at our next seminar too.