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Let’s
face it. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complicated subject—and not
only is it complicated, but the professionals don’t even agree about what
works best. On
the other hand, it’s become pretty obvious that SEO is no longer something
businesses can ignore. Especially small businesses. Where
does SEO fit in with small businesses, home businesses, and freelancers?
How can a small business owner make sense of the many parts? Is SEO practical
or effective for small business? These
are all questions I’ve been asked repeatedly by clients, and I’m pretty
sure they are questions that are on the minds of many business owners out
there. With that as my motive, I’ve created this article to explain everything
a business owner should (and shouldn’t) know about SEO.
What
is SEO and Why You Should Care
Search
Engine Optimization is about getting more traffic by improving your rank
in organic search. By organic search, I mean free search. So at it’s root,
SEO is about getting free long-term exposure for your business.
Now there
is an important distinction to make regarding types of SEO. There are generally
considered two types of SEO, white-hat and black-hat, and they vary based
on their primary goal. White-hat SEO is about making your site easy for
Google to read, creating valuable content with relevant keywords, and building
links in an honest fashion (more on these later). Black-hat SEO is pretty
much about tricking Google into ranking higher, and doing anything dishonest
to influence your search positions. There are several blurry areas, but
for the purposes of this article I’m going to stay firmly within white-hat
territory. Now
that we have that finished, let’s move on to the interesting parts.
Why
you should care about SEO
The
internet is only growing, and people are spending more and more time immersed
in its digital waters. At the very center of this trend are search engines—they
are the primary way of finding or being found on the internet. SEO is about
getting you ranked well and helping you profit from search engines.
- SEO
brings traffic. As in, people looking at your business.
- SEO
increases visibility, so your business can be found.
- If
you set yourself up correctly you can benefit for years.
- SEO
helps manage your company’s reputation online.
- SEO
is a necessary step to marketing your business online.
If
you want to expand your business onto the internet, there really isn’t another
choice but to understand and implement good SEO practices. Without them,
chances are you won’t get very far online.
Code,
URLs, and Crawlability
The
first step in optimizing your site for search engines lies with making the
code and URLs of your website “crawlable”. Just as a quick warning, these
are things you should know about, but you should probably have your web
guru implement them.
The
code
Basically,
in order for you to rank and get traffic from Google or other search engines,
they have to be able to read your website. The key point is that search
engines can only read text. This means all of your images should have a
textual description, you should have a lot of textual content, and you shouldn’t
have an entirely flash or javascript website.
The
URLs
Once
search engines can read your website, they index (save and file) each page
based on the unique URL (the address you type into the bar). This is important
because some websites don’t have a unique URL for each page, which leads
to the content getting all mixed up in the search engines. If your website
does this, chances are you won’t rank well in Google or any other engines.
Take a look at the picture below for examples of good and bad URLs.
Not
only are unique URLs important, but having keywords in the URL is also
important. Search engines count URL and Title Bar keywords heavily, and
if you aren’t using them then you’re missing out on a vital piece of SEO.
Semantics
This
is something that we’ll look at more in the content section, but it needs
to be at least brought up with regard to code. A properly optimized website
will use semantic code to market headings, paragraphs, lists, etc… This
means that each part of your content is given a relative importance. Google
uses this prioritization to figure out which keywords are important, so
you should ask your webmaster to make sure your website is coded properly
to use these standards.
Content
and Keywords
The
content and keywords of your website are both things you probably have control
over (you might even be able to edit them yourself), and are both parts
of SEO that you can implement yourself.
Content
Content
includes any text, images, audio, or video that you put on your website.
For this article we’ll focus on text, since it is the primary way Google
understands your website. The others need to be described with text in order
for Google to register them. Here’s
the simple overview of content and SEO:
- Content
is good
- More
content is better
- Lots
of content is the best
Content
is what search engines rank. If you have a lot of content, you will have
more pages that can rank, and more ways to get traffic. So the more content
you have, the better. But it’s not quite that simple, content quality
is very important. A high quality article will get a lot of traffic from
social media and will get more links, which is a big factor in SEO (see
the next big section). Also good content will be relevant to your website
and have relative keywords in it. So don’t just throw up a crappy page and
expect it to rank well—your content needs to be well thought out and provide
some good value.
Keywords
When
Google reads your content, it distills everything into a list of keywords.
It is those keywords and phrases that control what searches your website
will show up for, so they are of crucial importance. There
are three important things to consider when looking for keywords. Is the
keyword relevant to my business? How often is the keyword searched for?
How competitive is the keyword? Keyword
Relevance You want to find keywords that have to do with your business
so that they will bring in traffic that is valuable to you. A good way to
come up with relevant keywords is to just brainstorm and come up with a
list of words and phrases your target customer might use to find your website.
Keyword
Popularity You need to find keywords and phrases that are being
searched for regularly, or else you might rank #1 and get no traffic.
Keyword Difficulty Once you have a nice list of popular
and relevant keyword phrases, it’s time to cross out most of them. Many
keyword phrases, and most individual words, are extremely competitive and
very difficult to rank for. When you’re just starting out, it’s best to
go for the easy ones first.
Content
Structure
It’s
important to structure your content in a way that is semantically correct.
This means using the right heading style for each heading, and using them
in order of importance. A properly structured page will look like an outline
with big headlines, little headlines, and paragraphs. This semantic structure
helps accessibility, helps people scan your pages, and help search engines
rank you properly. Here’s an example of good and bad page structure:
Popularity,
Links, and PageRank
Once
you’ve dealt with code, content, and keywords, the rest of SEO is kind of
like a big popularity contest based on who links to you. Each website that
links to you is saying “hey, this site is cool” so your ranking goes up
a little. But it goes a step further than that. Do
you remember what happened in high-school when one of the cool kids said
something was cool? That something all of a sudden became much more popular
than if a normal kid had said it was cool. Google works in much the same
way—links from authority sites count much more than links from a new website.
The end result of all of this is something Google calls PageRank, similar
to link popularity in other search engines, all of which is basically a
measure of how important your website is online.
More
Links, Higher PageRank, Better Rankings
In
order to give your site more weight, and get ranked higher, you need to
build links from other websites—especially authority sites (sites with high
trust and high PageRank). There are many different ways to get links to
your site, some are good, and some are bad. Some
good ways to get links include quality directory listings, blog comments,
writing articles, guest posts on blogs, and social media.
Get
Trustworthy and Natural Links
Probably
because of the number of people competing for search rankings, it has become
reasonably common for businesses to try cheating the system. Most of this
cheating involves the process of automatic link building, and most of the
time it works terribly. In
order to defeat the cheaters, Google has made trust a key element of ranking
well. This trust is not built upon the number of links you have, but on
the type and quality of each link, and the overall appearance of all of
your links (your link profile). Because of this trust system, it’s very
important for you to get links naturally and really aim for quality links.
Link
Quality
Getting
a quality link has several parts to it: Originating
Page The page that the link comes from needs to be a quality page,
with relevant content, and not too many other links. If the page is a “links
page” and has little text and mostly other links, it probably isn’t a great
source. Also important is finding a page that has a relatively high PageRank
itself. Anchor
Text Anchor text is the text that actually links to your website.
Good anchor text will have relevant keywords in it. Bad anchor text will
be irrelevant or just a URL. No-Follow
This point needs to be here for accuracy, but it definitely complicates
the matter and is something that you should probably ignore if you’re new
to this. Basically, a link can be formatted such that it won’t transfer
any benefits to your site. These links are called “No-Follow” links, and
shouldn’t necessarily be avoided (they can still send traffic) but they
won’t help your search engine rankings. Basically,
you’re looking for other up-standing citizens of the internet who will link
to your content because it provides value. If you try to pay for links,
or get free links with no editorial control (anyone can get in), chances
are you’ll end up with low quality links.
Getting
Links With Content
One
of the best ways to generate links is by creating outstanding content and
publishing it on your website—you want to create the type of article that
is so in-depth, or of such high quality, that other people can’t help but
link to it. This type of content is often called linkbait because
it is designed to get links. Some people find that a term a bit spammy,
but either way the fact remains that you can get good links by creating
really valuable content.
Should
You Pay For This Stuff?
Whether
or not you should pay for SEO services depends on your situation and your
marketing goals. If you want to build a popular website that generates a
significant number of leads, it’s probably going to be necessary to get
some SEO help. On the other hand, if you only have a business card website
that helps you sell in person, and don’t really want to sell or market online,
then it might not be worth the time or expense to go after search traffic.
Consider
whether or not you’ll be able to get a return on your SEO investment. If
you send more people there, will your earnings go up? If
your website can’t generate leads, or sell your product, or make money,
then you might want to think about that in more detail before investing
in SEO. When
thinking about investing in SEO, it’s a good idea to see what resources
you can afford to spend. You may be in a position where you want to pay
someone to do all of the work for you, or you might be in a situation where
it’s better to spend the time and do it yourself. Whatever
your situation, I always recommend hiring a professional to deal with things
like code and website structure. It’s very rarely worth it to learn highly
technical parts, especially considering they change frequently in SEO. The
content and link building are things you can do on your own if you have
the time and energy.
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