Anyone who has been tasked with increasing online sales, website conversions or growing a customer database most likely has a passing knowledge of SEO. But for a metric so important to business success, is a passing knowledge enough?
SEO is defined by David Booth in his course Search Engine Optimization on Lynda.com as – “the process of making improvements on & off your website in order to gain more exposure with search engine results”
That’s pretty broad wouldn’t you agree? Afterall, what is the definition of an improvement? What is the difference between on & off your website? What does exposure look like to a search engine?
We will tackle each question in stride.
What is the definition of an improvement on a search engine?
Let’s ask another question first, how does Google and other search engines rank web pages in the first place? The answer is pages are ranked by how relevant and useful they are in relationship to the search terms.
So if a search engine prizes relevance and usefulness most of all, wouldn’t you agree that that is a great place for us to start?
Of course it is.
Google Keyword Planner is a great tool to help you. Here you can type in specific keywords i.e. dog food, puppy chow, kibble and Google will crunch the numbers and give you historical statistics and traffic forecasts like predicted clicks and estimated conversions. Additionally, Google AdWords will help you to research new keywords you might not have thought of related to your product or service. The goal here is to optimize the effectiveness of your keywords. Are you starting to sense a theme here? On-Page optimization is the name of the game. You should scrutinize each one of your keywords for relevance and optimize for usefulness.
However as the true nature of the grail can give life, the false nature of the grail can take it from you. Google and other search engine bots are continually trolling the internet and analyzing web pages for relevance and usefulness. Bots will reward web pages employing effective on-page keyword optimization with higher page rankings. If however a search bot comes across such nefarious techniques as keyword stacking, that is to say forcing high relevance keywords repeatedly, it will penalize the web page with a lower ranking. Why? Because sure the web page may have included many clever high relevance keywords but in the process it flagged itself as not useful. It’s Google’s way of saying ‘Cheaters never prosper”
Next question, what does on & off your website mean?
Off website would imply the changes you would do at the root directory. On website would involve on page content optimization.
For example, if we wanted to improve the off website ranking we could submit an XML sitemap to each search engine. An XML sitemap is a roadmap to all important pages on a website. This roadmap guides Google to all main content on a website. Having an XML sitemap can be beneficial to SEO because search engines will be able to retrieve essential pages of a website very fast, even if the internal linking of the website isn’t flawless. Faster delivery means a higher page rank on the search engine.
If we wanted to tackle on-website optimization we could initiate a content creation plan. We could write 1 blog entry per week, create a product demo video and link to it on YouTube, or perhaps create an Image Gallery with relevant product descriptions. The possibilities are literally endless. The key is to keep in focus the core of the principles. Create content that is relevant and useful to your search terms.
What does exposure look like to a search engine?
A link counts as a vote on the internet.
A search engine is more likely going to promote your site if it is linked to well respected other sites.
However, some “votes” are worth more than others. In effect the internet is a weighted democracy.
To optimize for exposure it is suggested to employ a link building strategy. Seek opportunities to cross brand with other well respected companies. Use internal linking with navigation and contextual links to assist search engines in analyzing your website. Use external linking sharing highly relevant content, submissions to web directories and the use of share buttons. All of these techniques are effective means to improving your SEO ranking.
The world of Search Engine Optimization after deeper analysis is not so scary after all. Remember to keep relevant and useful at the core of your strategy and you will appease the search engine bots. Happy Optimizing!