Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is all about getting your website noticed and highly-ranked, for words and phrases (keywords) that people actually use when they are searching for a company with a product or service like yours.
More important than just "getting your website noticed" is "getting Pages of your website noticed".
This is because unless a website visitor lands on a page, when they click on their Google search, that matches what they just typed into the search box, they will probably just click away and look at the next result is the Google list.
Dozens of books and thousands of articles have been written about SEO. Most are useless. Beware of Search Engine "experts" that don't understand this basic concept. Too many think that getting your home page noticed is all-important. Obviously if you have a single product or service, then optimized the heck out of the home page.
As an example, if you are a property manager and someone just searched for "apartments for rent", you want them to land on your apartments page, not your upscale homes page. If you do auto repair and someone just searched for "front-end alignments", you want them to land on a page that features this service (maybe with a coupon good for 72 hoours), not your smog-check page or your home page that shows an engine being rebuilt. If you are a restaurant and someone searched for seafood, you want them to land on a page with great-looking tasty seafood, not steak. You get the idea (most SEO people don't).
So in a nutshell, SEO is all about influencing the search engines to giving a high-ranking, to pages of your website for keywords that represent your products of services.
So how do you "influence the search engines"?
Google claims that over 120 factors go into their algorithm to rank the results for any keyword (word or phrase). Yahoo and Bing (Microsoft) use a similar number of factors.
So what is the most important consideration for someone's SEO efforts?
The Title Tag — This tells the search engine what the page is all about. This is also what the internet user sees, underlined, in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It is important that it matches what the person is searching for, and does so in a way that stops them dead in their tracks and makes them click.
Links — The second most important factor are links on other web sites that point to you, but not just any links. The clickable words (anchor text) tell the search engine what other people think the linked-to page is all about.
When the anchor text agrees with the target page's Title Tag, along with text on the target page, all search engines then score that page very highly for that keyword.
These links from other websites are VERY, VERY important.
Keyword research, identifying the right keywords to optimize pages for, is the most important aspect of good SEO.
Some SEO Myths:
- Duplicate content is penalized
- Keyword density is imporant
- Directories are search engines
- You need to have a site map page
- Google loves blogs
- The "keyword" Meta Tag has some importance
- Page Rank (Google's score from 1-10) is important for your website
- Page Rank is important for your the websites that link to you
- Links from a site's home page are counted higher than links from a sub-page
- If you link out from a page, you are diluting your page rank
- And I love this one (part of a $1,000 course on SEO) — Sculpting your page rank within your website
- And on and on.
Most SEO "experts" believe this stuff because they have never tested anything themselves and just repeat what other people say. In fact, most of these experts believe these myths (and many more) and repeat them as fact.
But the proof of their expertise is how many clients have they pushed to number-one Google positions for highly-competitive keywords.
Search Engine Optimization is an art. Very few firms offering these services get results for their clients.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEM is a combination of SEO and using the paid (sponsored) search programs., such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter. There are many others.
Managing a paid search program is beyond the scope of this short article, but should be considered as a method of gaining exposure and new business through your website. |
