Search Engine Optimization for Marketers

SEO is not an enigma.  Anyone can do Search Engine Optimization.  The key is understanding what google wants. Online marketers fall into two camps in regards to becoming visible and getting traffic via organic search.

• The “I don’t care…I want it now” camp- This school of thought simply forgets about SEO altogether. Rather than hope that they will rank for a money term, they leave nothing to chance. They use PPC to figure what keywords convert, figure out the margin that they will have to promote the product via pay-per-click and then go for it. Usually, these guys will take an initial loss and then start to make money quicker because it takes the guess work out of SEO.
• The niche marketing organic search model- This model is akin to throwing up as many properties as you can, creating link wheels and link schemes to rank for non-competitive high volume keywords. The benefits of this model are you retain the pages you create for future SEO endeavors and it usually cost far less initially to get up and running. The downside is that there is a lot of guess work that goes into building a keyword list and usually profits aren’t immediately evident.

Both work but today I am going to focus on the second model as it is the most popular model among single do-it-yourself-internet marketers. In fact, this is probably one of the number one internet marketing strategies, if not the top.

I am going to cut straight through the crap.  You don’t need some SEO expert at least initially to get ranked for long tail terms. That said, SEO is NOT marketing.

SEO is not some mysterious science that only a select few know and understand.  Sure.  When you get into advanced SEO techniques it can get kind of hairy, but for the most part it isn’t something anyone should be scared of.

There are only 2 types of SEO techniques that you need to be worried about.

Onpage Optimization

Offpage Optimization

The onpage stuff is primarily the things that YOU can have complete control over.

The offpage optimization is really, for the most part, out of your hands (that said, the pro marketers know how to manipulate these rankings. I will go more into this later).

Onpage Optimization Tips….

Onpage optimization is simply all the things that you can do directly to your site.  There are factors that will affect your onpage optimization. These include:

• The title tag of your site
• The meta tags of your site
• The title tag of the actual page
• The actual content of your site
• H1, H2, H3 tags (content headers)
• enboldened, underlined, and italicized text within your content.
• You link structure with the appropriate anchor text.

This is for all sites: free or paid hosting, blog or static website platforms….it does not matter.  All things considered equal, your static website could outrank my blog or visa-versa depending on how well you can optimize your site.

To understand onpage optimization, we need to look to see what a google bot will see.

When a bot (or spider) enters your website, they will start at the top left hand side of your site and start to move down, from left to right.

Your job, as a webmaster is to give google as many clues as you can as to what your site is about.

My friend, Grizzly, said it best when he said that a google bot should know exactly what your site is about before it even reaches the content.

Of course there are variables to this.  Let look at this closer……

Let’s pretend that you have a hunting site.  Let’s say that you have managed to grab a link from a hunting site that links to you.  A web bot will travel to this hunting site, and move from the hunting site through a link to your site with the anchor text “hunting bows”.  This would be the bots first clue.

The bot would be coming from another site with the anchor text telling the bot that the site may be about “hunting bows”.
Now, that it arrives at your site, it will start at the top left and start searching trying to piece together exactly how to categorize your site.
It’s second clue could be the actual URL itself. That’s right. Forget what they tell you. If your primary keyword is in in the URL or better yet, is the URL, then your chances of ranking for that keyword is much better than say someone like me trying to rank high for the keyword internet marketing with leodimilo.com.

I know I am making this ultra simple but am doing this for simplicity’s sake.  Onpage Optimization is really as simple as that.  And really, when you think about it, it makes sense.

You see, Google is just trying to categorize your site.  In order to do this, it needs to know what your site is about and how relevant your site is according to your keywords and LSI keywords that surround it.

In other words, using “hunting bows”, as an example, google has come from a site that is relevant within the niche (which passes some authority that says hey google…this site is about this….).

It reaches your domain (which says hey google…this site is about this….)

It  goes through your title tag (which says hey google…this site is about this…)

It reaches your meta tag description (which says hey google…ect.ect.)

It hits your content header (the title tag of the post)….

At this point, it is likely that google has all the clues it needs to know what your site is about….

The icing on the cake is the content itself….

So google of course, complies and says…well, they say that your site must be about your keyword and therefore they categorize you.

You get placed in the proverbial ranking line for whatever keyword it has you categorized under.

If you were to just optimize this way and this way only, you would be far ahead of most of the websites out there.  Why?  because most websites don’t bother with onpage optimization.

Of course, you could be like everyone else and do search engine optimization from the bottom up….

Of course, getting ranked high is another story altogether…..more on that later….

Other SEO Articles, you may find interesting:

• How to get your site indexed in the search engines quickly
• Less is the New More When it Comes to Getting Ranked
• Bruce Clay and Google- Ranking is Dead? My thoughts…
• 3 SEO Musings on Outbound Link Structure,Keywords and TrustRank
• Keyword Research Tools Give Accurate Traffic Volume? I Don’t think so…
• Keyword Sniping for Beginners

Subscribe in a reader