What is SEO?

What is SEO? Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to techniques that help your website rank higher in organic (or “natural”) search results, thus making your website more visible to people who are looking for your product or service via search engines. SEO is part of the broader topic of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), a term used to describe all marketing strategies for search.

SEM entails both organic and paid search. With paid search, you can pay to list your website on a search engine so that your website shows up when someone types in a specific keyword or phrase.

Organic and paidlistings both appear on the search engine, but they are displayed in different locations on the page.So, why is it important for your business‟ website to be listed on search engines?

On Google alone, there are over 694,000 searches conducted every second.

I Think about that. Every second that your website is not indexed on Google, you are potentially missing out on hundreds, if not thousands of opportunities for someone to visit your website, read your content, and potentially buy your product or service.

What about paid search? Yes, you can pay to have your website listed on the search engines.

However, running paid search campaigns can be quite costly if you don’t know what you’re doing. Not to mention, about 88% of search engine users never click on paid search ads anyway.

Because the sole purpose of a search engine is to provide you with relevant and useful information, it is in everyone’s best interest (for the search engine, the searcher, and you) to ensure that your website is listed in the organic search listings.

In fact, it is probably best to stay away from paid search all together until you feel you have a firm grasp on SEO and what it takes to rank organically.

On-Page SEO

There are multiple elements on your website that you can control to make it easy for the search engines to index your content and understand what it is all about.

• Website Content
• URL Structure
• Pictures
• Title Tags & Meta Tags
• Headline Tags
• Internal Linking

Off-Page SEO

Compared to on-page SEO, off-page SEO can certainly be more difficult to execute.

Off-page SEO entails building relationships with other websites through the creation of attractive content, or reaching out to the people who run the websites. This process of building relationships is called link building.

Who is linking to you, how they are linking to you, and how your content is shared in social networks and across the web are all factors that can have a significant impact on your ability to rank on the SERP.

• Who ‘s Linking to You?
• How are they Linking to You?
• Using Social Media to Spread Content
• Using Email to Spread Content

Identifying Keywords

• How to Identify Long-Tail Keywords

The key to successful SEO is concentrating on long-tail keywords. Although these keywords get less traffic than more generic head terms, they are associated with more qualified traffic and users that are most likely further down their path of intent.

The good news is that choosing the right long-tail keywords for your website pages is actually a fairly simple process

• Check Your Web Analytics

Web analytics tools like Google Analytics will allow you to see what organic search keywords are already driving traffic to your website. These keywords will provide a good baseline of core keywords, and provide you with a list of keywords and performance which you can benchmark your future SEO efforts against.

• Keyword Research Tools

Google has a few tools that make it easy to conduct keyword research. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a great place to start.

You can insert one keyword, multiple keywords, or even your website address, and Google will then return a list of related keywords along with simple metrics to gauge how fierce.

the competition is around each one and how many searches it gets on both a global and local search level.

• Search for Keywords

Besides looking at your web analytics data or using a keyword research tool, there is a lot to be said for simply going on the search engines and conducting a few searches.

Measuring Success

SEO can take a lot of time and effort. What good is spending all this time and effort if you can’t see the fruits of your labor? There are many metrics you can track on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis to keep your SEO plan on track and measure your success.

• Traffic

Measuring overall traffic to your website from organic search is something you should look at on a weekly basis. This will help you determine if the changes you made in the previous weeks or months have started to have an impact.

• Leads/ROI

Web analytics tools like Google Analytics and inbound marketing solutions  can make it easy to see how many conversions have occurred on your website as a result of organic search traffic and keywords.

These tools will also allow to you set up multiple conversion definitions (visits, leads, customer) so you can really get a sense of how much return you are getting on your SEO investment.

• Indexed Pages

Measuring how many pages the search engines have indexed for your site is an easy way to measure the growth of your SEO efforts and your website. The more pages that are indexed, the easier it is to rank for more keywords.

Free tools show you how many pages you have indexed. Measure indexed pages on a monthly basis. This number should always be going up.

• Inbound Links

Inbound links are the easiest way to determine how successful you have been at off-page SEO.

• Keywords

Keep a list of the keywords that are driving traffic to your website from organic search. On a monthly basis, dive deeper into your organic search traffic and analyze what keywords were responsible for driving the traffic.

Your brand keywords are usually going to be responsible for the bulk of it. If possible, separate out brand keywords and pay close attention to the non-branded keywords that are driving traffic to your website.

• Rankings

Select a list of the top 10 keywords for which you want to rank. Every month, go in and conduct a search on Google and see where you rank. Record your rank and you will be able to see if your SEO efforts have helped you improve.

Make note of jumps of over five spots, because those changes are usually not the result of normal search engine updates and changes.

Now What?

Developing and executing an SEO strategy can be a daunting task. However, this process is completely manageable if you dedicate adequate time and resources to it. There are several things to consider when getting started with SEO.

• Make a List of Keywords
• Build Keyword-Focused Pages
• Set Up a Blog
• Create a Link-Building Plan
• Stay Current on SEO News & Practices