1. What Is SEO? Part One
Search Engine Optimization Helps Your Small Business
Get Discovered
Lets face facts here, your a small business owner and your competing with some big names on
the internet for the attention of your potential customers. And without the use of proper search
engine optimization methods your small business marketing website is going to be buried under
all the other content that is available on the net. But with the application of sound SEO
methods, you can quickly become a recognizable brand online if your doing it right.
There are a couple of key things that you need to know however in order to get started.
First, lets define exactly what SEO is. According to Search Engine Land SEO stands for
“search engine optimization” and its nothing more than the process of getting free traffic from
search engines. The process consists of your site showing up in the search engine results
(SERPS) under the “organic,” “editorial,” and “natural” listings of Google and Bing (Yahoo is
showing results from Bing).
These listings are computed by the respective providers “search algorithm” that attempts to
rank web pages (not websites), video’s and other types of content based on the keywords the
search types into the search box. The goal of SEO is to take what we as marketing
professionals understand about the search engines and optimize our web pages in order to let
them know what are content is about.
Here is a short 3 minute video to help you visually understand the definition of SEO.
Second, when your trying to learn about SEO your going to find that there are some solid truths
that you need to know and some information that is just plain going to get you into trouble. But
we will get into these more as we go through this entire eight part SEO series.
How Search Robots Work
Ok the first step to know about how to seo your site starts with knowing a bit about how the
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2. search engines actually read or find your website. This is the first step to getting your site
ranked properly. So lets dig into is a bit. Don’t worry about this being too complex though
because I have added the infographic below to help you understand it a bit better. Also, this is
a simplistic breakdown and its done on purpose. There are over 200 different things these
robots look at, and it changes everyday, so don’t sweat this stuff. It just important to know.
Ok, the first step is getting the robot (also known as “spiders,” “bots,” and “crawlers”) to find
your site. You can do this the fastest by signing up for a Google Webmaster Tools account and
a Bing Webmaster Tools account. This is the quickest way to let both sites know that your web
property exists.
Once they do, eventually, their robots will come over and take a look at your site. The first thing
that they do is cache an image of your site. You will usually see the last image that they have
taken inside your webmaster tools account. And, with Google, if you find your site in the
SERPS that thumbnail will appear when you hover over the link. This is a great feature when
your searching around as well because it allows the user to determine if its a good fit for what
they are looking for.
The next thing that happens is the search engine spider starts to read your source code (the
programming that make your site look the way that it does). In the source code the crawler is
attempting to find out what your site is about and we have a few things that we can use to help it
do that.
The first is your URL. Its always a good idea to have the keyword about your topic within the
url. And if you don’t have a topic specific URL, but a brand name URL like ours this is really
more important then ever. If you are using a content management system (CMS) like
WordPress then more than likely with a few simple tweaks it can be done automatically for you.
The next place that is real important is the title of your content. Again, you want to have your
keyword in there. But its also important to create compelling titles that people actually want to
click. When it becomes a toss up between keyword optimization and a compelling title always
lean towards the keyword though. We have one more spot we can use to generate the click.
The meta description is just that place. Of course as with the url and title we want are keyword
inside there. But we also want to make this our advertisement for the click. You don’t have a
lot of space to optimize the description however, so you have to choose your words carefully.
I’ll dive more into this and other “on-page SEO factors” at a later date.
The final place that the robots look is at your content itself. Now this is the tricky part, and quite
frankly you can ask 200 different SEO’s and get 200 different answers to this one. But you
want your keyword in your content obviously. But its 1000 times more imporant that your
content is very high quality.
Google in recent months has launched several different filters to its algorithm that have all but
shut down thousand, even millions, of websites that have horrible content. So there are a few
do’s and do not’s that you have to know about right off the bat before you start writing for your
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5. The Do Not’s For Content Writing for SEO
1. Do not copy other people’s content onto your site. It might be tempting to be able to run
to different article directories and other such sites and pull that content onto your web
pages. But the thing is that duplicate content and just plain crappy content doesn’t rank
well. As a matter of fact it hurts your chances of ranking at all. So just don’t do it.
2. Do not copy your content onto other websites. This was an old back linking technique
and I can tell you from experience that it doesn’t work. Keep the content that you have
on your web pages your exclusive copy.
3. Do not keyword stuff your content. There was a point in time that them more instances
of a keyword the higher that you ranked in the search engines. Today however, they
have caught on to this method and have targeted sites that have done it. As a general
rule of thumb we keep our keyword density down to around 2%. Anything more than
that really tends to ruin the reader experience anyway.
4. Do not over-optimize your web page. This one will become more clear when we talk
about on-page optimization so just remember this don’t when we get to that point.
The Do’s for Content Writing
1. Do write for readers. Remember that the goal of the search engines is to end the
search. The more likely they are to end the search right away, the more likely users will
prefer to use it right? The same goes with your web pages. The better your content, the
more they will hang around and even come back.
2. Do write high quality content. Remember a piece of content doesn’t need to have a
specific amount of words to it. Just because you can write a novel doesn’t mean its
going to be good write. Answer a question in your post. Be concise as possible to
make sure you are addressing everything.
3. Do use images. We will go over how to optimize these as well. But images break up
the look of a web page and keep your readers focused so use them in your content as
well.
I’ll address content creation in an whole other series to help you get the most out of your work.
But those two lists should keep you going pretty well when it comes to the SEO aspect of
content.
So The Robots Found Your Site, Now What?
Now that the spiders have found your site and know what its about, what is the next step. Most
people would say that it ranks your site in search results. But that might not always be the
case. There are pleanty of sites out there that are not in the search engine indexes.
But don’t get stressed out about it if they don’t list your site right away. First, it might take
some time to get them listed. Second, both the major search engines have a few thousand
different computer banks all around the world and that information needs to be passed to all
them.
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6. If your lucky though, your site will be listed in around 24 hours. If your really lucky it will be
listed on the first page of the SERPS for your chosen keyword. If its not, don’t worry we will get
you there.
Read More... http://www.central87.com/what-is-seo-part-one/
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