What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization Demystified
A blog is only a useful marketing tool if your customers can find it on the internet. Of course, you can point them to it from your business cards, your email signature, promotional materials, and your website, but you need search engines to be able to find your blog. To understand search engine optimization (SEO) we start first with the customer looking for a solution to a problem over the internet.
For example, let’s say you run a business that sells plumbing services and supplies. A potential customer goes to one of the main search engines — typically, Google, Yahoo!, or MSN — to look for a plumber to repair a leaky pipe, so they type in “plumbing repair”. A page of results comes back and your desire is to be at, or near, the top of the list. At the very least, you want to be on the first page as most people won’t dig further than the second or third pages looking for solutions.
Then, the question becomes, how do I get the highest ranking on the page so my potential customers can easily find my blog or website? The way search engines rank sites is through the use of bots or spiders – computer programs that crawl through blogs and websites looking for new and updated content to send to search engine databases. Spiders are especially interested in keywords, the terms that people type into the search box to get the information they’re looking for.
Early in internet history, some Web designers would load their websites with repeated keywords and stuff them into the meta-tags (the coding used in the web design) to increase the count and frequency of the keywords and artificially improve their rankings. But the search engine companies developed complex formulas, called algorithms, to factor out this artificial loading of keywords and make search results more relevant.
Keywords and phrases are among the most important tools in search engine rankings. For our plumbing business example, relevant keywords might include “plumbing”, “plumbing repair”, “fix plumbing,” and any others that your customer might query. It’s crucial to figure out what keywords your customers will use to find your business so you can incorporate them into your blog on a consistent basis and improve your ranking. Depending on the source, the percentage of keywords should comprise somewhere between three and five percent of your text. Google Rankings is a free tool that will measure the words and phrases most used within your website or blog.
In our example, “plumbing” should also appear in your blog’s title because “spiders” look not only at frequency of keywords, but at their placement on the page. Use your main keywords and phrases as you continue to write your blog and incorporate them into your titles. As you blog, it’s important to note that you can’t simply count on keywords used in previous posts to help search engines find your latest post. Each blog entry is a page, much like a book, and spiders are looking at newer pages. However, links to previous blog pages in your current posts will help to keep them visible.
Another factor search engines use in determining your blog’s rank is your link popularity. Link popularity is the number of links to your blog or website from other sites. In other words, it helps to have others link to your blog. Not only does this increase your reach and visibility, it adds an aspect of objectivity to the rankings.
While there isn’t much that you can do to get people to click through to your blog or website, you can increase the chances by having a number of link partners. Simply search for relevant blogs or websites that you find informative and ask the blogger if they’re willing to exchange links. Most will be glad to reciprocate as having their blog linked from yours improves their search engine ranking, too. In the plumbing example, you probably don’t want to link with a competitor, but linking with a reputable contractor or a realtor would create a good referral partnership. People trust referrals and the link exchange provides reassurance by association.
Even basic SEO can appear overwhelming at first, but blog often and it will become second nature to incorporate keywords and phrases. There are plenty of free SEO support and analysis tools available from the major search engines. Below is a list to get you started:
GOOGLE:
Google Rankings: Check the ranking of a Web page in Google
The Google search-based keyword tool provides keyword ideas based on actual Google search queries and matched to specific pages of your website so they are relevant to your business.
A host of MSN’s keyword research tools is available at Microsoft’s adCenter Labs.
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