Search Engine Optimization – Only One Part of a Succesful Internet Marketing Strategy
The internet is an ever-changing landscape and search engine optimization is a constantly evolving strategy by which businesses can compete for online visibility. To know how to optimize your website and maximize your return, it's important to understand the ins and outs of this complex field. That's why we've put together this post all about SEO, complete with info on what SEO includes, what it doesn't include, and how companies can actually risk being penalized by Google in order to increase their rankings!
For example: many people consider SEO simply as the process of optimizing a website so that it appears at the top of google search results. While this is an important aspect of search engine optimization, it ignores the fact that websites are not digital versions of the Yellow Pages or a white paper. The likelihood that someone will actually want to read a business' website is very low and any company with a website (regardless of how good its content is) will be penalized by Google for having no interesting content!
SEO has become a popular buzzword because in the past couple years, search engines have become more sophisticated at their job. Each time the algorithms have changed, people have been confused about what's more important: optimizing your copy or optimizing your code. It's important to understand that both are necessary, but not to the exclusion of the other. It's wise to remember that search engines are there as tools to help people find what they want. If your website is a good tool, they'll want to link their results back to you.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an umbrella term for all of the tactics used to improve your website's ranking in the search engines for keywords associated with your business' primary goods or services. A complete SEO strategy includes:
* Keyword Analysis – The process of identifying keywords and phrases related to your business' products, services and area of expertise in order to craft relevant content that is likely to be found by your target audience.
* Link Building – The process of acquiring high quality links from sites that are related or relevant to your business. This is one of the more technically challenging parts of an SEO campaign because Google cares a lot about the quality and relevance of the links you build, which can be a challenge when you're not popular enough yet to have high quality contacts in the industry.
* Link Popularity – Algorithms are constantly evolving, so there is no way to predict how Google's ranking system will look in 10 years. However, one thing is clear: link popularity (i.e., the number of links and the quality of links pointing to your site) remains a very important ranking factor.
* Search Console Optimization – Contrary to what many people believe, this group of tasks has nothing to do with optimizing the site for search engines; rather, it's about optimizing your historic and future Google Webmaster Tools profile by doing things like cleaning up 404 errors and unclaimed pages. Over time, these low-level activities have a cumulative effect on the overall quality of your site and thus its ranking.
* Site Structure – A website's site structure is a critical component of its success because it helps Google understand what your business does. The standard three-tier structure (Home/Products/About) makes it harder for Google to determine the relevance of your content to search queries. Many businesses improve their rankings by dividing their content into "microsites" or "vertical sites" (e.g., www.yoursite.com/flowers) that are much more specific than their main website or by creating an About Us section in order to make it clear what their business is all about.
Creating a sophisticated site, carefully tailoring your content to fit the needs of your target audience, having a lot of high quality, relevant links and making sure your site is properly indexed is all important in search engine optimization campaigns.
According to Google's Webmaster Guidelines: "In general, we do not think that working on higher-level issues like sitemaps and robots.txt will have much of an impact on the rankings themselves. Instead, we encourage you to focus on optimizing the content that appears on the page. It is very important to do a good job with this since we know users do not click on results that they believe are not relevant to their query."
Google (and other search engines) have strict guidelines about what can and cannot be done to optimize a site. For example, Google says it is "unlikely that large industrial organizations will ever have sites that are considered spam-free because they have so much content in a variety of forms: images, links, news articles and so on. Similarly, most legitimate organizations won't make all of their content available for free download. In most cases, organizations will want to keep their blog content behind a paywall or simply not share it with the public at all."
So, in a nutshell: Google states that "individuals and businesses can't control their rankings, but they can control what they publish. What they publish is the main factor in gaining or losing search engine traffic" and "the quality of the content that you submit will impact your search engine rankings" (source).
Improving your website's rankings is the key to getting more visitors and customers. The key to improving your rankings is to create engaging content that will attract people and then make your content easily accessible through unique URLs that are optimized for search engines. Only having a user-friendly website is not enough; you must have a link-friendly website. Your overall goal should be to get "thousands if not millions of visitors from Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines" (source).
Another important point of SEO is " Content Is King" – content is what people want, so it's critical that you deliver what they want.
Your website's rank and position on the search results page will improve as you continue to add new content. People don't like being sent to a dead end. If your website is "disconnected" from other websites, people will never be able to get back to your site in the search results. An unfulfilled desire can result in staying away from you forever. So, make sure your website is relevant and that people will find their way straight back again (and again).
I started my business with the goal of creating engaging and useful information for others, but I didn't know how to accomplish it! I thought if I could just get my site up and running that I would start getting some traffic.
Conclusion
In summary, as with any other kind of marketing and/or sales promotion, SEO requires a well thought-out plan and a solid strategy. On the Internet, this strategy is set up by choosing a niche that you can best serve with your content and then having a plan for connecting with relevant people who are likely to want to find you.
If you're just starting out in business or looking for some more information about how to sell products over the Internet through SEO, there are many good books on the subject. One book that I especially like is "SEO for Dummies" (published by Wiley).