SEO Techniques
The top 10 spots in the search engines command audiences from 10 searchers upwards of 10 million searchers per month, so when making the choice to enter the SEO ring, plan your strategy carefully. Jumping into the SEO arena is like going to battle. You must arm yourself with the most up-to-date arsenal of SEO techniques available today or you will be fighting a losing battle from the very start.
To help kick off your strategy, here are a few SEO techniques that can be implemented by even a “newbie” in the SEO world.
- Keyword Research – All optimization campaigns begin with the correct keyword selection. Take your time in researching your terms and decide what service/product is most important to your bottom line. What is it that brings in the money to your business? After deciding on your most profitable product/service, research your keywords paying attention to the competition and amount of traffic that keyword will bring in to your site on a monthly basis. Who cares if you’re #1 for “polka dotted pansies” if no one is searching for that term, right?
- Search Engine Friendly URLs – This is a basic practice in the SEO world, but one that some people look over too easily. When the search engines are determining relevant sites for their ranking systems, the URL of a site is still considered. If you are still using URLs like this “default.html”….you’re missing out! A proper search engine friendly URL would be along the lines of this "/weddingphotographer.htm" or "/wedding-photographer.htm", so you can assist the search engines in returning relevant results for your website.
- On Page Factors – This is one of the most controversial topics that you will come across in the SEO game. What’s important and what’s not? To put it simply, the top 3 important on page factors are title tags, heading tags, and unique content (including your keywords peppered around in there). If you want to experiment around with meta tags, you will also find that there are a few winning combinations that will increase your rankings as well.
- Link Building – Link building is like the building blocks of your website. For every incoming link you have to your website, the search engines grant you “this much” more credibility. Now let’s say that you were granted a link by Microsoft, you have now acquired “THIS MUCH” recognition from the search engines. Why is this? Linking is not all about how many links you have coming into your website, the quality of these links is what’s important. If you have 100 links coming into your website from little known generic websites, you will lose out in the rankings to a website that has only 10 links coming in from credible aged websites. The main reason for this is the trust that the search engines grant the older or more popular websites. This is probably one of the most overlooked points in SEO…quantity is never better than quality!
These techniques are by no means conclusive of what is required to successfully optimize a website. A successful SEO must arm themselves with the basics (or groundwork) before attempting more complicated web2.0 strategies. However, the above pointers will definitely put you on the right track to get your website campaign pointed in the right direction!
