What is SEO?
SEO is short for search engine optimization. It is the process of making the search engines value your site more than all the other sites. Thereby, place your site at the top. Search engines are the backbone of traffic. You can think of the internet as one huge reference manual and the search engine are the index.
Imagine your website in the middle of that reference manual with no listing in the index! How would any one find you???
The internet has become so big there are literally millions of competing pages for even the most obscure categories now. The truth is just getting listed is worthless unless your listing is on top is not going to make difference. If you are not in the top ten, you are not really playing the game, and the answer for you is SEO.
So what determines who gets to be on the top? The placement is determined by an algorithm. An algorithm is nothing more than scoring system the Search Engine uses to add up points based on criteria it deems important. At the end of the day, the page with the most points wins.
Google optimization:
Optimizing for Google is the hardest but it also produces the highest level of results, by far.
A top ranking on Google can provide anywhere between 10x to 100x the traffic of Bing and Yahoo combined.
Optimizing a site for Google can take three, six, or even twelve months to achieve significant rankings, which is long. The good news is that when you start optimizing for Google you will start to achieve top rankings in Bing within a few months because Bing is much easier to rank for. And while Bing won't bring you the profits you are after, it is encouraging seeing your website at the top of any search engine.
The question now is how we optimize our site effectively?
SEO is short for search engine optimization. It is the process of making the search engines value your site more than all the other sites. Thereby, place your site at the top. Search engines are the backbone of traffic. You can think of the internet as one huge reference manual and the search engine are the index.
Imagine your website in the middle of that reference manual with no listing in the index! How would any one find you???
The internet has become so big there are literally millions of competing pages for even the most obscure categories now. The truth is just getting listed is worthless unless your listing is on top is not going to make difference. If you are not in the top ten, you are not really playing the game, and the answer for you is SEO.
So what determines who gets to be on the top? The placement is determined by an algorithm. An algorithm is nothing more than scoring system the Search Engine uses to add up points based on criteria it deems important. At the end of the day, the page with the most points wins.
Google optimization:
Optimizing for Google is the hardest but it also produces the highest level of results, by far.
A top ranking on Google can provide anywhere between 10x to 100x the traffic of Bing and Yahoo combined.
Optimizing a site for Google can take three, six, or even twelve months to achieve significant rankings, which is long. The good news is that when you start optimizing for Google you will start to achieve top rankings in Bing within a few months because Bing is much easier to rank for. And while Bing won't bring you the profits you are after, it is encouraging seeing your website at the top of any search engine.
The question now is how we optimize our site effectively?
On-site vs. Off-site optimization:
Some important on-site SEO rankings factors:
Title tags are the words at the top of each page (above the file button) and are one of the most important factors for your on‐site optimisation. The title tags are the headings which appear in the search engine results pages.
Internal linking: a link from a page on your own site is still seen as a link, which means that the more you can affect you own SEO. One of the reasons why Wikipedia ranks so well is because it has millions of pages that link between one another.
Freshness: how new your content is. Google places a lot value on fresh content because it knows that its success is based on getting the best information in the hands of its users. If Google sees that your website is constantly producing new content all the time it will visit you site more often so it can find new content as soon as it is available.
Original content: one of the most important factors is that they only show one version of a web page to their users. If you have the same exact wordings as another site (even you own) then Google will choose which one of those pages is more important and will put the other in the supplemental index and now show it to its users.
Avoiding duplicate content is similar to having original content, but you can add to it by making sure that your web pages look significantly different in the eyes of the search engine. This is particularly true for e-commerce sites where there are a lot of product images and short descriptions, but not a lot of unique words on the page.
Having keywords in the domain name usually only helps when the domain name is the exact keyword search (for example, homeloans.com.au). In our experience, having any other keywords in the domain name apart from the main keyword phrase doesn’t produce the best results and you’re better off having something more memorable, such as your company name.
Some important off-site SEO rankings factors:
Off-site SEO is where the results are achieved and is all about links. Every link to your site is like a vote for your site, the more votes you receive the higher you will rank. But unlike voting, not all inks are created equal, with some links having significantly more value than other links.
Link popularity: is the number of links you have coming in to your site. A site with 1000 links has higher link popularity than a site with 100 links.
Link reputation: is what the link say in them. When another sites links to your site with the keyword ‘SEO tips’ in the link your site has started to build link reputation to rank ‘SEO tips’. The more links you have with the right keywords in them the greater the chance you will have to rank for particular phrase. Link reputation is where you can control what you rank for.
Link authority: is how powerful the site is that linking to you. Where links popularity simply looks at how many sites are linking to you, link authority also looks at how many sites are linking to the sites that are linking to you, and so on. This is also known as page rank. The more Page Rank a site has the higher the value that links has to your SEO rankings. A link from a site like apple.com, which has a higher Page Rank, is worth more than a thousand links from low Page Rank sites.
Link trust: is focused on the site that is linking to you and how trustworthy its vote for your website is. If your links is on the link exchange page buried among hundreds of other links on that page then the link trust will probably erode over time. On the other hand, if you have a link on the homepage of a site is also important.
Finally, your link building must look natural. This means that you need to be consistent with your link building, but also mix up your link reputation and the types of links you get.
Negative SEO rankings factors:
While there are a number of SEO ranking factors you should implement, there are also certain things you should avoid or, as we will call them, negative ranking factors. Make sure that your site does not have any duplicate content issues and that all content is original.
Do not use hidden links. One of the strategies used a few years ago was to have hundreds of links in the footer area of every page of your website, but to make the colour of the text the same colour as the background. This doesn’t work and can easily be picked up by Google; that can penalise you as a result.
Having an unreliable server that results in your website being offline throughout the month will decrease your website’s trust in the eyes of Google. So ensure that you have a good hosting provider that has a good uptime track record.
Linking from your site to low quality or spam sites is another way to quickly lower your website’s trust. If you are linking out to any sites, ensure that they are of the highest quality.
While link exchanges worked in the past, they can actually hurt your rankings now if not done correctly. Stay away from link exchanges for now and do not have any links or resources pages on your site. This is a clear indication for Google that you are implementing link exchanges.
Website security is a new negative ranking factor, but it is becoming more prevalent. There are more and more instances where hackers are hacking websites and loading malware that infects your visitors’ computers, or uploading a script that makes hundreds of spam web pages on your site that link out to adult, gambling and pharmaceutical sites. When Google finds these pages on your site they add a warning to your SEO ranking and can remove you from their index if the issue is not resolved in a timely manner. Ensuring that you have strong website security is something you will want to implement once you have top rankings and you want to protect them.
How long before you get results?
How long it takes for you to achieve results will depend on a number of factors including how old your site is, how many pages it has, what (if any) SEO you have done in the past, which keywords you are focusing on and how much time you are investing into it each month.
Depending on these factors it can take anywhere from 3 months to 12 months to start to gain some traction. But when the momentum does start to build the sales and profits will quickly start to roll in.
The first step:
With SEO we can measure everything, and we WANT too so we can see our progress over time. So, as a first step you should install Google Analytics on every page of your website so you can measure your SEO traffic and conversion performance over time.
Go to www.google.com/analytics and click on the ‘sign up now’ link on page. Follow the prompts and then take the code provided and add it to the footer area of every web page on your site if you’re not quite site. You’re sure how to do it then speak with your webmaster or web designer – it’s a very simple job.
Make sure to add Goals to your Analytics account so you can see which keywords are producing sales or sales leads for your business.
Keyword Research:
Before we get into the keyword research it’s important to understand what a keyword phrase is. A keyword phrase is any combination of words a person types into a search engine to conduct a search. It can be anywhere from a single word, up to 10 words or more, with the most profitable keyword phrases containing 2 or 3 words.
The keyword phrase a person types into Google to conduct a search can tell you where in the sales cycle a person is, whether they are at the research stage, or whether they are about to make a purchasing decision.
The Importance of Keyword Research:
Keyword research is THE first and most important step in your SEO campaign, because the keywords you select will form the basis of your entire SEO campaign, from both an on‐site and off‐site perspective.
Selecting the right keywords to focus on will make the difference between earning significant profits in the next 12 months, and not making anything.
The last thing you want to do is spend the next 12 months optimising for a particular keyword phrase, thinking that it will be very profitable for you, only to find out that the keyword you have selected (which does have a lot of searches each month) isn’t a keyword phrase that generates any revenue for the sites ranking for that phrase.
It is far better to take twice as long with your keyword research and get it right, rather than rushing it and getting it wrong.
SEO profits are all about the keywords you are ranking for, here will give you the exact process to use to find the best keywords for your own site.
Types of Keywords:
A navigational query is intended to locate a specific web page. The user has a single website in mind, often the official homepage or sub-page of an official site. For example, a search for IBM should bring up the IBM site, rather than an e-commerce store selling IBM products.
An informational query seeks information on a topic. The user is looking for information on the searched topic, either broad or specific. The searcher’s goal is to learn something by reading or viewing content on the web, such as text, images, video, etc. For example a search for ‘Australia’ should bring up the Wikipedia page about Australia, rather than a souvenir shop.
A transactional query seeks to complete a transaction on the Web – for money or free – of a product or service. The user is mainly looking for a resource (NOT information) available via web pages. The goal is to download, to buy, to obtain, to be entertained by, or to interact with a resource that is available on the result page or made available through the result page. For example, a search for ‘Beatles poster’ should bring up a site where you can buy a poster, rather than a page on how to make posters.
Identifying Keyword Types:
In the beginning it might be difficult to differentiate between keyword types.
Here is a quick method for identifying what type of keyword a particular phrase is.
When in doubt, conduct a search on Google and see who is ranking. How tight is it? Are all the rankings on the first page offering the same product, service or piece of information? Or are there many different types of results for that keyword phrase.
If you see that the majority of the sites on the first page of Google are business sites, selling the same thing as you, then you can be confident that the keyword is a transactional keyword phrase.
If you find that the majority of sites on the first page of Google are reference sites, such as Yahoo Answers, About.com and Answers.com, it is a sign that this keyword phrase is an informational keyword phrase.
As a general rule, you want to see at least 5 direct competitors on the first page of Google, including one competitor in the top 3 spots.
