SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the act of trying to get your site on the first page of the search engines when a particular keyword or phrase is searched.
It is much more effective to make yourself available so that people can find you rather than trying to go out and find them. The best kind of traffic you could get is that from the search engines because you know these people are targeted. They are actively searching for key terms that relate to your site. Once you get them there, if you have quality content, you will start to see results.
While nobody outside the search engine owner knows exactly how their algorithms work, there is evidence we can look at to show us what we need to do to get ranked.
The following are the 3 main components to an SEO campaign:
- Keyword research
- Site optimized with selected keywords
- Getting backlinks
Each of these has multiple parts that we will discuss more in depth below.
Keyword Research
The first thing you must do to get ranked is decide on what keywords you want to target. This means, when a person enters that specific key word or phrase into the search bar, you want your site to appear on the first page of results, hopefully in the top spot.
Single word keywords are not recommended. They are typically either too common and the search engine spiders ignore them or they are so highly competitive that you could never get ranked for them. Thus it is recommended to use what is referred to as a "long tail keyword". A long tail keyword is a phrase of usually 3 to 5 words that someone would theoretically be typing into a search engine search bar.
For the sake of example, let's say you want to promote your blog about cookie recipes. Some of the key phrases you may want to target would be "Best Cookie Recipes", "Top Cookie Recipes", or "Favorite Cookie Recipes". Alright, once you have thought of a few, let's go check them out. Go to the Google Keyword Tool and type one of those phrases into the box. You will have to fill out the captcha form to get results. Once you see the list of results, they should be sorted by relevance with the first one being your exact phrase. You should get a screen that looks like this.
Take a look at the Competition column and the columns showing the monthly searches for this term. The idea is to find one that has relatively low competition and plenty searches for that term. It does you no good to rank #1 on Google for a term nobody is searching for. In this example, and of the first 3 results look pretty good.
The next step is to to go to Google and see how many results you get for these search terms. Open a Google search and type your keyword phrase with quotes so it looks like this:
"best cookie recipe". Here is what you will see. Note the number of results circled in red.
If there are millions of hits when you include the quotes, then it will be hard to compete for that search word. As a rule of thumb you want to stick with a term that has less than abotu 50,000 hits. With just over 10,000, this term would be a really good one to target.
Go through this process and pick 2 or 3 and let's move on to step #2.
The next step is to to go to Google and see how many results you get for these search terms. Open a Google search and type your keyword phrase with quotes so it looks like this:
"best cookie recipe". Here is what you will see. Note the number of results circled in red.
Go through this process and pick 2 or 3 and let's move on to step #2.
Site Optimized With Selected Keywords
The next step is to make sure that your site has the proper amount of these selected key phrases. Some pages may contain 2 or 3 of your phrases while others will focus entirely on 1 phrase. Either way, you will want to check the density. If you have more than 3% of the text on that page as your key phrase, the search engines view it as potential spam. If you have too little, say under 1%, the search engines will not see it as being quite as related to that keyword and therefore not add as much weight to that keyword. The idea is to rewrite your pages and try to maintain a 2% keyword density. Here is a great tool for determining your density. After you ahve edited the page, enter the url here and it will give you teh stats you are looking for. http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/
Now we are ready to head to the final, and most important step of all.
Getting Backlinks
This is the biggest part of the process for any SEO campaign. It will be the most time consuming and there are many different ways to do it.
Some of these methods include:
- Article marketing
- Sharing via social media
- Social bookmarking
- Blog and forum commenting
Article Marketing
We will not get into how to write articles here. That is a lesson for another day. Article marketing can be quite time consuming, at least at first. The best part is, that article will be there for a long time. The other plus to this method is, most article submission sites have a really high page rank (PR). What this means is, search engines will give more weight to those links than ones from lower PR sites. Remember, the idea is not to get floods of traffic from people who read your article. You want that quality backlink to boost your search engine rankings.
Sharing Via Social Media
Sure, you will want to share every new blog post or page you create at all of the social media sites you can, but it goes much deeper than that. Today, most sites or blogs come with the ability for people to share your page via social media, but if yours does not, you need to get a widget to do that. There's share this or sociable, but whatever you use, you need to have it. Sharing your own content is somewhat helpful, but when the search engines see that others find your content worthy of sharing, it goes much further for helping your rankings. Don't be shy abotu asking people to "tweet" or "like" your pages or posts.
Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking is a great way to build quality backlinks fairly quickly. However, much like with social media, bookmarking your won stuff doesn't work as well. People have been saying to go bookmark your own page every time to create a blog post or page or write a new article. basically, everything you do should be bookmarked on multiple sites. Is there some benefit from this? Yes. Could it be done better? Absolutely! Again, it is much more beneficial if others share your information. The same widgets usually include several bookmarking sites. Be sure you have that option on your site.
There is another way to get social bookmarking backlinks fairly quickly, from other people, and it's free.
I will not promote very many tools, but this is one that you just cannot do without if you want to generate backlinks. The concept is simple, although it will take a little time to set it up the first time. Once you have created an account at each of the sites used in the program, the rest is as easy as clicking a button once a day. You will get an email with a link every day. All you have to do is click the link that says "Share All" and it will take you to the site. Once logged in, you will see your "Quick Share Queue". Click the Share All button and you are done. You have just earned credits. Now, when you get ready to ad one of your sites, all you have to do is enter the details as described and others will share your site in the same way. This way, different people are sharing your site on social bookmarking sites. You will get one share a day per link. This is great because it makes it look natural to the search engines, as if people were coming across your site daily and deciding to share it.
Blog and Forum Commenting
This one takes some time, but can gain you some targeted exposure. The idea is to find some blogs and forums within your niche, read posts and comment on them. On blogs you can usually add a link back to your site when leaving a comment. On forums, you will need to register and create a signature file. This is where you would put your link and it will show up on every post you make.
All you have to do to find these sites is a quick Google search for blog of forum and add your keyword or something related to your niche after it. This is also a good way to see what others in your niche are doing. Viewing related blogs can be great inspiration for your own blog writing. You can even use material from other blogs in your blog if you are careful, but that is another training.
This has been a crash course in SEO. I hope it sheds some light on things for some of you.
For more on SEO visit Influx Marketing. Or, for other Network Marketing How To, be sure to visit HomeBiz4UNow.com.
