The ABCs of Search Engine Optimization
2/26/2010 10:03:13 AM Central Standard Time by Main - 4 comments.
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) can either be made very complex and hard to understand or very easy to comprehend. My goal in this article is to make it very easy and give you the basic ABC’s of SEO.
To sum up SEO in one sentence, it simply means getting your website(s) in favor with the search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo so they can send you lots of free traffic and then keeping your website(s) there!
First, let's start with what exactly Search Engine traffic means. While this article is not intended to be a complete guide to SEO by any means, I'll quickly cover a bit of the basics to make sure you understand them.
Here is a screen shot from Google when I typed in “mom web hosting” on my computer.
I've marked the Paid listings with black arrows, and I've marked the free “SEO” listings with a red arrow.
To get your web site listed where the black arrows are, you must sign up with the Google Adwords program which is set up as a paid advertising program and that's an entirely different subject. You trade cash for clicks, basically.
But, we'll be talking about the red area – which is FREE. I'll bet you can imagine that MomWebs.com, which has the first position in Google for “mom web hosting”, is working very hard to keep that spot. Free traffic is a good thing.
As I mentioned, Search Engine Optimization can be made very complex or very simple. In order to get traffic from the search engines, you'll need to focus on two things:
- Making sure that your website is very clearly telling the Search Engines what it's about.
- Making sure other people are talking about your website, too.
The first is called “on-site” factors and includes things like having posts that are relevant to your topic, having lots of great related content, and making sure your titles and images are named using words that will help Google to figure out what your website is about. It obviously gets more complex than that, but look at it like a game of 20 questions. Make sure Google, Bing, and Yahoo only have to ask a few before figuring out what you're about. If they are confused then no dice.
The second is called “Off-site” factors and is all about getting other websites to link to your website. This is the more important of the two, so focus 90% of your efforts on this. You'll want to work on anything that can get you links.
For instance -
- Article marketing
- Blog commenting
- Guest blogging
- Squidoo marketing
- Twitter & Facebook marketing
- Stumble Upon marketing
- Video marketing
- Press release marketing
- Forum marketing
- Podcasting
Anywhere you can get links to your website from quality related websites, just do it.
Hopefully now that I’ve defined SEO for you, you’re ready to dive in and take a look at how to optimize your current web site. Remember it all comes down to being a content creating machine! So what's your best SEO tip?