Have you checked your Search Engine rankings lately?
No matter how beautiful your website or easy it is to navigate, if it’s not found by those searching for your products or services it’s of no use. Google alone receives several hundred million searches queries each day through its various services and it’s highly likely some of those are directed at the products or services you offer. Are they being found.. or are your competitors? If you want traffic, highly targeted, highly interested traffic, you need to have search engine visibility. Ranking high in search results for keywords and phrases that are important to your business doesn’t happen by accident. It happens as a result of SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing visibility in the natural or organic section of search engine results (non-paid area). In general, the higher and more often a website appears in the search engine results page (SERPs) the more traffic it will receive from the search engine. SEO takes into account the algorithms search engines use and applies techniques to HTML code and content to increase relevancy for keywords and phrases. In addition, removing any barriers that may prevent a website from properly being indexed are eliminated. Finally, off-site promotion of the website to increase the links back to the site (backlinks or inbound links) is a tactic that is used.
A trillion reasons why your website needs SEO
A brand’s position on search engine results pages (SERPs) is critical to driving traffic to the site. In a recent study from iCrossing is was found that more than 95 percent of all site traffic for organic, non-branded queries, on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing comes from page-one results.
Source: iCrossing - "The importance of Page One Visibility", Feb. 2010
When done properly SEO is one of the most cost effective ways to drive “targeted” traffic to to a website. After all, it’s the keyword or phrase the visitor searched that caused them to arrive at the website. With well over a trillion pages on the internet, arriving on the first page of a search result doesn’t happen by accident.
What does a search engine do?
To better understand whats involved in a typical SEO campaign it’s best to understand how a search engine works. In their simplest terms, there are only three key processes:
- Crawling: Web bots move from page link to page link collecting new and updated pages to be added to the index.
- Indexing: Web bots process each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, it process information included in key HTML tags and attributes.
- Serving Results: This is the SERP’s that is created by searching the index for matching pages and returning the results that are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by many factors in a highly guarded algorithm.
Do It Yourself SEO steps
Professional SEO’s have a lot of insight into the optimization process. Search algorithms change all the time effecting ranking positions and ultimately traffic patterns at your website. However, if you have the inclination to SEO your own website there are some things you can do on your own. Here’s some steps:
- Familiarize yourself with SEO: There’s a lot of information online about what’s involved in the SEO process. You don’t have to become an expert but like anything, you get out of it what you put into it. SEOmoz has a very good Beginners Guide to SEO that’s free and will get you started down the right road. Also, I recommend Google’s SEO Starter Guide that does a good job outlining best practices that you should follow. Make sure you checkout the end of this document that outlines tools and resources that will help you along the way.
- Evaluate your SEO readiness: Use an automated tool to evaluate your websites SEO readiness. My favorite is Instant SEO Review at SEO Automatic. This service is free to any business owner managing their own internet marketing program. All you need to do is sign-up for a free account and you can run a full website report once a month. The review tool will report over 20 on-page search ranking factors, grading each with a “Notable Issue”, “Worth Reviewing”, or “Correct” score. Useful information is given about the issue and in some instances how to fix the problem.
- Make the quick fix’s: Many of the search ranking factors with problems can be fixed on your own, especially if you’re website is built using a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal. These platforms typically include provisions for defining many of the HTML tags and attributes.
- Create your website using a CMS with optimized SEO plug-in: If your just starting your website or planning for a redesign, consider a CMS that has an SEO plug-in available. These plug-ins can take care of many of the on-page technical factors of the optimization process. These add-on’s are not a substitute for an SEO strategy, but rather a structured facility for managing your SEO strategy. My favorite WordPress SEO plug-in is the All-In-One SEO Pack.
- Write good effective SEO copy – SEO copywriting is the art of writing copy for humans that is appealing but ranks high in search results for keywords and phrases important to your business. Much has been written about how to go about this and I recommend the CopyBlogger article “Copywriting 101: An Introduction to Effective Copy” which includes a 10 step tutorial about how to write effective SEO copy.
- Establish webmaster accounts: Each of the 3 big search engines (Google Webmaster Central, Bing Webmaster Center, and Yahoo! Site Explorer ) have their own webmaster accounts available and provide tools to submit your website for indexing and will verify that your website is being crawled by web bots properly. They also provide other information that can help you debug issues that may be prevent your site from being indexed.
- Claim your Local Search listing: Local Search is an important topic these days because 40% of all queries have local intent (5% use the city and/or state name, 2% use informal terms, like neighborhoods, and 0.5% use zip codes). The 3 big search engines have a their own local search capabilities with a listing claim process (it free) that should be completed. The best way to claim your listings is to visit GetListed.org where they will guide you through the process for each search engine.
- Create your own backlink campaign – Backlinks are incoming or inbound links to your website or web page from another webpage. Search engines use a number of factors to gauge the value of backlinks and can ultimately influence your search rankings. Much has been written about how to build and execute an effective link strategy but one of my favorite’s is Link Building Fundamentals by Adam Audette.
Learn more about how Willamette Web Design can help you increase your rankings in search results.
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