Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics: 5 Steps to Ranking Higher
The summary:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is very rewarding when successful, but keep in mind that it is a long-term endeavor. Success requires time and effort by following a consistent and well-tested program. For this article, we will refer to Google a lot for the simple reason that they account for over 70% of all web searches. The concepts in the future work with any search engine.
To get started, let’s quickly review why Google and other search engines do what they do. First of all, they are all businesses; that is, they exist to make money. Advertising is the life blood of all search engines and to be successful they must accomplish two things. First, Google must provide the end user with a rich and rewarding experience by providing relevance to their searches. What relevance means is that Google wants a user to find what he is looking for. Second, for businesses to advertise with them, Google must provide quality customers to those who advertise through ads. Content providers and websites that help Google achieve both of these goals are handsomely rewarded.
So what makes a website relevant?
Search engines want to know which site is relevant to a particular concept. These concepts are represented by phrases or keywords. Example: single family homes, luxury resorts, organic food store.
Possessing massive computing power, search engines read all of these pages and rank the sites based on a set of rules. When you enter a search engine and type in a key phrase, the search engine chooses the best matches by looking at the following hierarchy:
1. Authority… How many links from your sites on the topic. The more links to your site, the more authority
2. When the keyword is the main focus of each site. They determine this by the structure of their sites
3. Which pages of the sites are more dedicated to the key works
4. Where those pages are more relevant than all other pages in the search engine index.
No search engine publishes its exact criteria, much less the search algorithm, but we’ve found that the following factors matter for high search rankings.
Title Tags – Tags at the top of the hierarchy page. They are the first thing search engines look at.
Description Meta Tag – Affects your ranking and some search engines display this as a snippet in their search
Headers (h1, h2, h3, etc.) – Headers provide a summary of the content to search engines when they crawl. If your header contains the keyword, that shows relevancy.
Paragraph Copy: The more you write, the easier it is to get ranked. However, don’t stuff the keywords. Including your keywords in the copy multiple times will actually hurt your rankings.
Links and Link Text – The more links your authority increases.
Filenames: keyword-enriched filenames
URL: keyword rich URL help
Trust factors: physical address, privacy policy, contact page
Image Captions – Text captions near image results
What doesn’t matter:
Keywords meta tag: Since all SEO people abuse them, most search engines ignore this.
Hidden Text: Text that is hidden from view for “keyword stuffing.” This will hurt you, as once it is discovered, your site will be de-indexed.
Keywords in bold and bulleted text
A note about Flash:
Another tip is to avoid using too much flash on your website. Flash compiles files, links, fonts, and structures differently than a typical html page. The search engine can crawl (ie read your website) but cannot organize the data in a meaningful way. Google and Adobe Systems (maker of flash) have announced that they are working to make flash more friendly, but as of this writing, a flash-heavy website is detrimental to a good SEO ranking.
5 steps you can do for a better ranking in Google
Now that you have a basic understanding of SEO, here are 5 easy steps you can implement to rank better in Google.
Step 1: Avoid Blackhat Techniques. Black Hat SEO uses tactics designed specifically to improve search rankings and trick search engines into providing a higher ranking than a website would receive based on that search engine’s algorithms. These techniques will give you a quick boost, but the downside is too great. If caught, the penalties range from having your website disappear from the rankings altogether, or having your website dropped to four or five pages without warning. There are only 10 results per page on Google and the first page receives 80% of all clicks. Simply going back a few pages will cause you to lose all of your search engine traffic.
Step 2 – Choose the right keyword
Choosing the right keywords to base your site optimization on is the most important step. Avoid general or generic keywords as these are generally not the best approach. Most of the time it is better to be specific and focus on niche keywords related to your service or product.
For example, let’s say you own a hair salon.
The problem is that there are many hairdressers. So how do we get it on the top 10 page?
We need to find our niche and be more specific.
1. We can optimize for a specific market
2. We can optimize for a specific location
3. We can optimize for a specific hairdressing technique or service
Depending on the product or service you offer, your target market will change. Just keep in mind that when searching for a keyword, be specific. Also, the average search phrase is 3-5 words, so remember you don’t need a keyword, you can search for keyword phrases.
An example is that you can optimize your “hair salon” for “Los Angeles Hair Salon”. If you live in a specific neighborhood in Los Angeles, you can go with “Westwood Hair Salon” or “Beverly Hills Hair Salon” or “Hollywood Hair Salon”.
You can find out how many websites are competing with your keyword simply by doing a Google search and noting how many search results are returned. For the example above, “hair salon” returns 25,300,000 websites. Westwood Barber Shop returns 21,300 results. Obviously, the more sites you compete with, the harder it will be to break into the top 10 results.
A good place to start looking for keywords if you can’t afford some software is the Google Adword Traffic Estimator.
There are many software programs for keyword research. Of course, all good debts require a monthly fee or the purchase of software.
A simple technique to get started is to optimize each page of your site for a different search phrase (2-3 words each).
Step 3. Your URL and title tag
Two of the biggest determining factors in Google ranking are your domain name and title tag. For example, a domain name like:
hair-salon-losangeles(dot)com will generally rank higher than yourcompany(dot)com, assuming they have identical keywords and content.
Because most of us have already bought the domain name, and the keywords in the domain name would seem funny or unprofessional; the following tactic is helpful. Try to add keywords in the name of your pages.
yourcompany(dot)com/hair-salon.html
The title tag is just as important as your domain name. Improve your ranking on Google by using keywords in your title tag.
Going back to our hair salon example, a good title tag would be:
“Your company is the best barber shop in Los Angeles.”
Also, the closer to the front of your title tag the keywords are placed, the better.
Step 4. H1 tags and keyword density
Tags are not used as much as they used to be with the advent of style sheets. However, Google’s ranking algorithm still uses them.
Google’s ranking algorithm dictates that if you are using a tag, then the text between this tag should be more important than the content on the rest of the page.
keyword density
Keyword density is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the content on the page. Putting keywords in your page content can improve your keyword density. The ideal keyword density is 7-10% for each page of your site. There are penalties for overdoing keywords, so don’t overdo it.
Step 5. Links, links and more links
Backlinks are websites that link directly to your website. However, remember that building backlinks takes time and doesn’t happen overnight. The more backlinks you have, the better. Your website will rank higher under the principle that your website must be good if so many websites are linking to it. Submit your site to many directories like Yahoo! And Bing are important steps to increase the number of sites linking to yours. Another great place for backlinks is Yelp! (if you are a restaurant) and other vertical searches and directories. Trading backlinks with other businesses you know is another great way to build backlinks. I would recommend emailing 10-15 websites every day to ask for backlinks or partnership links. Within 8 weeks, you should have 50-100 sites linking to yours.
