Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines. The higher a website appears in the search results list (preferably on the 1st page), the more visitors it will receive from a search engine. As an internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how a search engine works and what people search for. Let’s assume that our main search engine is Google. At the moment, Google is the biggest search engine out there, so getting Google to view your website is very important for having high rankings. So, how do you do that?
The main idea is to “rank high” in Google (to appear on the 1st page of Google). There are several techniques / methods that help you bring your website up in Google or to boost your ranking (this is usually referred as PR - page ranking). Most of these techniques take significant amount of time.
I would like to consider them as 2 approaches - On-page Optimization and Off-page Optimization.
On-page Optimization:
When we talk about on-page optimization, we mean adjusting the site in a way that helps Google to understand what your site is about. That kind of optimization primarily involves editing the content of the website, its HTML and associated coding to increase its relevance to specific keywords for a search engine. This includes:
- Competition analysis, keyword research and optimization
- Meta tags development & optimization
- Title tags, description meta tags
- Keyword meta tags creation & optimization
- Content optimization based on specific keywords
- Header H1 tags optimization
- Creation & optimization of Bold Text and Alt tags
- Keyword density & prominence optimization
- Robots text file creation
Off-page Optimization:
This is when we need to show Google that our website is really valuable, that many other sites (sites with higher ranking) refer to it. How would Google know that our site offers valuable information? Answer: By having many visitors and by having many backlinks pointing to our site. The more backlinks our site has, the more solid and prominent our site looks to Google. So, how to create those backlinks or where do we get them from? What influences your Google ranking? Here is the basic strategy to get your backlinks from:
For a website to have a high ranking, you would need to get backlinks from all these different sources. In red, I listed just a few samples from each of the backlink source. Here are a couple of words about each of these sources.
1. Social Media
Through social media you can communicate with your potential customers, you work on building a database of your friends. Then you can advertise your specials / offers / new services as well as links to your website page with specials.
2. Social Media News, also called Bookmarking Sites
These are sites where people can register and leave their opinions, reviews, interesting facts, even a short mentioning. Social bookmarking sites are sites where you share urls that you think are interesting enough for other people to see and connect and get interested in them. It also allows you to leave a link to your website.
3. Blogs
These blogs are similar to your landing pages or articles. You can create blogs on different topics related to your industry, this is a way to engage people to communicate and talk about your business. It also connects to your website, you can refer your readers to go to your site for more info...
4. Articles
Writing articles has always been a great way to get publicity and sales, but it's also important for search engine optimization purposes. Their great advantage is that articles provide high-quality one-way links to your site (these links are placed in the author’s bio area). Most article websites allow 2 links per article. What is even more important is that the articles and blogs can use your keywords and create theme-related content for your website. So, if readers are interested in your subject, you can invite them to visit your website. Many of the Article websites have a high ranking.
5. Video Directories
The best one is youtube. It gets a lot of views and now it allows to write a description to your movie as well as to leave a link to your website. You can also submit keywords.
So, if your business is about, let’s say, traveling to Hawaii, then with proper optimization, when people search for “Hawaii travel”, your website, your blog, your article or your video will pop on the first page. Or better yet, if they pop all together…
6. Press releases
The same applies to press releases. They mention your latest services, products...
7. Website Directories
These are similar to the Yellow pages... There are hundreds of directories on the internet. Some of the directories have a very high ranking (PR6+), some don’t have any value. The best directories are paid ones - like Yahoo ($299), others are free. Here you submit the Title, Description, keywords and a link to your website. For each business, you pick a category and a subcategory where your business will be listed, for example - Travel, Hotels...
8. PPC campaigns
This is when you run ads based on the keywords and that have links to your website (these ads generate traffic and cost you money).
9. Forums and Blogs
There are special websites called forums. This is where people talk about a particular interest, idea, business, application... You can join/register a forum and start leaving your own comments related to the topic. The most important here is that when you register, you can leave a link to your website. Sometimes, you can just join the forum (without actually leaving a comment). The same thing applies if you leave a comment to somebody’s else blog. While regering, you create a link to your website and use your keywords. You need to be accurate about leaving comments since they can be considered as spam. You can purchase backlinks from various forums and blogs but need to know how many backlinks you can order and where not to get into a sandbox or be blocked as being a spammer. I will write about this in more details separately.
10. Exchanging links
This is when different companies (different websites) exchange links with other sites preferably from the same industry that have the same rank or higher. In this case, we create a file that would contain a description of the partner and a link to their website (they provide). Similar, they will have a file on their server that would have a description of our business with the link to our website that we provide.
11. Reviews, Testimonials
It’s a good idea to encourage people to leave reviews on Yelp, Go Places, youtube videos, tripadvisor... These are high ranking websites and are searchable.
So, if you implement optimization of your website and will work hard on getting backlinks from all of these sources, you guarantee to get on the first page of Google. And get more visitors to your website. We’ll talk separately how to optimize your website in more details and about building the backlinks for each of these sources.