SEO Basics
SEO is the process of ranking higher in the search engine results for keywords related to your business, with the main goal of driving more traffic/visitors to your site to convert into customers or another goal. The way the search engines (Google in this case) rank sites is based on complex mathematical formula called the Google Algorithm. It’s 200+ factors, each differently valued, that when combined, add up to a total “site score.” The site with the highest score will rank the highest. In SEO, we leverage the certain factors we can control to maximize ranking results and put our clients’ sites ahead of the competition.
Keyword Research
If you’re ranking #1 for a keyword that nobody is typing in, you might as well not be ranking at all. Keyword Research is the foundation to a solid and successful SEO campaign. I track down the best keywords using the Google Keyword Tool, and organize them by searches per month and relevancy to your business. I then check out the competition for the keywords, which allows the setting of both short and long term ranking goals to maximize the traffic to your site and ROI (Return on Investment) as quickly as possible.
On Page SEO
Google and the other search engines are quite simply programs that are designed to look in specific spots on a website to determine how relevant that page is for the certain keywords. With recent Google updates, having relevant content on the site is extremely important. This includes using synonyms and other words that Google would expect to find. For example if we were ranking for “pizza,” some great words to include on the page would include dough, cheese, pepperoni, pizza box, pizza parlor, and maybe even a few big brands like Dominoes. Having well organized content and overall site structure is important as well, as it makes the site much more search engine friendly and allows emphasis on certain keywords/pages.
There’s also spots inside the coding that Google looks at to see the page relevancy. The Title Tag is what shows up in the Blue Text on a Google Search. The Meta Description shows up beneath that in the black text. The Keyword Meta Tag is simply a list of keywords that are relevant to the page. The Alt Attribute is used to “show” Google what’s in an image, by describing it in this tag. Even though they’re in the coding, all of these are highly important in the ranking process. The better your On Page SEO, the easier it will be to rank with the Off Page SEO.
Off Page SEO
Google’s main goal is to provide the best content to the searchers. Some signals they use to track this include ‘how many sites are linking to your website and what pages are they linking to? What kind of sites are linking to your site? What’s the content of the page that’s linking to your site? How quickly did these links show up, and how often are new links found? How relevant in Social Media (Google+, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube)?’
The goal of Off Page SEO is to increase your web presence over an extended period of time, which is why it’s done each and every month. It focuses on building links to your site in a natural fashion, to mimic the normal growth of a website. These links come from all sorts of websites like business directories (Yelp, Yellow Pages, City Search), Social Bookmarking Sites (Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg), Video Directories (YouTube, Vimeo), Article Directories (Article Base, Ezine Articles, GoArticles), Web 2.0 Properties (Blogger, WordPress.com, Squidoo, HubPages), and all other sorts of websites including blogs and forums. The sites I listed are only a few big examples, there’s hundreds of more websites where links can come from.
Quality links are much more important than the quantity of links. We want to make your site appear to Google as if were becoming more popular. This involves building relevant links at a specific pressure over an extended period of time. Spammy or Blackhat techniques are very risky, create a bad online reputation, and can even your site banned from Google Permanently! At Executive SEO, we use 100% White Hat techniques that don’t raise any red flags at Google, pose no risk to ranking issues, and keep your site ranked for the long term. (Read more about Off Page SEO here).
With proper Research, On Page SEO, and Off Page SEO we can rank any site in any market. It’s just a matter of time, as we only need to make your site more appealing to Google than your competitors. Be sure to contact us to get your site ranked in Google, and take your business to the next level. Feel free to contact us with any questions as well. Thanks. ~Ryan England -Executive SEO
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