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Whilst it is generally agreed that content is king, the simple truth is this: if the content is not marketed correctly, nobody will see it. So really, when it comes to internet marketing, SEO is king, and there are three shining jewels in the SEO crown; keyword research, onsite optimisation, and link building.
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SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Finding anything on the internet will usually begin by typing a query into one of the major search engines – Google, Yahoo or Bing. That query is called a keyword. Before beginning any sort of work on a website, keyword research is crucial to determine what people are actually looking for and how many are looking for it.
Let’s explore this a little more by an example. If someone is looking to buy a new mobile phone, they might type “mobile phone” into a search website such as Google. Very simple, and very unclear. They will get around 172 million results for that simple search. They may remember their friend has a cool phone made by Motorola. So they search for “Motorola mobile phone”. About 14 million results. They look around and see a picture of their friend’s phone and it’s called the “BACKFLIP”. Search for “Motorola mobile phone backflip” and their search results are whittled down to about half a million with several reviews prominent in the first 10 search results. This is a more manageable size to deal with and will most likely provide them with solid information and more than a few legitimate buying opportunities.
By starting with just “mobile phone” they began with very general keywords. By further focusing down what they were looking for, they began to employ “long-tail” keywords, or more specific keywords, and are shown more detailed results. Long-tail keywords are targeted for a specific concept or item. Utilizing long-tail or targeted keywords on a website is crucial to getting motivated buyers. Someone who is searching for something like “Sony HD42 PX1” is much further along the root to making a purchase than someone who simply searches for “TV”. They have already identified what they are looking for and may be close to making a purchase. Someone who searches for “TV” is still gathering information.
By doing extensive keyword research a company is able to find out what people are really searching for as opposed to what the company thinks they are searching for. Targeting long-tail keywords will significantly increase a company’s ROI over going after more general search terms. As seen in the “mobile phone” example, refining the keyword will result in far fewer search engine results. This will allow a company to easily rank for a keyword which in turn allows people searching for that keyword to see the company’s site. It is far easier to achieve something when faced with 500,000 competitors than when faced with 172 million competitors.
More keyword research information here
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When it comes to onsite optimisation, there are two areas to consider – content and code. Both are important to improving a site’s search engine results and while often discussed separately, they generally work in concert. While each aspect of the code discussed below may have little impact on the SEO of a site by themselves, when added up they do affect a site’s search engine rankings.
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The idea of code is simply all the technical aspects of a website that are generally not seen by the average viewer. Google’s little robots search millions of website every second. They often will look at things that are encoded into the website that may not be visible to the naked eye. For example, Meta tags often include keywords, descriptions of the site and whether or not the search engine should index the page or not. Page titles are just that, the title of the page. Having the keyword at or near the beginning of the page title can influence the ranking of that page. Code to content ratio is used to determine how much content is actually on the page. For example if there is very little content the amount of code will be far greater than the content. This will most definitely be noticed by the search engines, making them think the site is more spam than real. The answer to this little problem is to increase the word count of the site - write better content and more of it.
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, content is often thought of as king. This is true for both visitors and search engines. Visitors of course will appreciate a fresh angle or a unique spin. They may even put a link to the article or website from their personal blog or website. Search engines like unique content because they hate duplicate content. Sites that produce short articles full of unnaturally occurring keywords, called keyword stuffing, or things that appear verbatim other places on the web will quickly find their search engine rankings falling. Longer articles with new and unique material will always do well.
This is also true for product descriptions. While it may be difficult to talk about the technical specifications of the new Sony HD42 PX1 in a unique way, it is far better to try than to simply reproduce the same details that all the other websites are. Google and the other search engines will reward the websites that do and in the process, visitors may actually stick around and buy something.
More on site optimisation information here |
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Building links to a website’s content is the third major step in search engine optimization. The major search engines will look at a website or webpage and see how many other places are linking to them, or linking back to them, thus the phrase “backlinks”. The webpages that have the highest number of quality backlinks will typically be determined to be the best and will rank near the top of the search engine results.
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However, not all backlinks are created equally and the search engines will also filter through the results based on quality of backlinks. Many less than scrupulous people have attempted to set up “link farms” that will produce thousands of links that have no purpose other than pointing a link to a webpage. This is not considered organic and therefore filters have been developed in order to help weed out the spam-style link farms.
This is key. The major search engines and Google specifically are constantly trying to clean up the search engine results with newer and newer algorithms for their searches. They don’t want people coming to their sites, typing in “mobile phone” and getting millions of webpages with nothing but garbage and spam. They want to be seen as the trusted place to go for searches. Google, Yahoo and Bing will continue to refine their search engines to produce the most relevant and authoritative webpages for the specific keyword searched for.
Creating links to a website that are both numerous and come from quality sources can be done and is done every day. It simply takes more time and effort to do than creating link farms. However the rewards are plenty as quality backlinks will continue to boost a webpage’s search engine result rankings far into the future, while spam-based links will disappear.
More link building information here
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Keyword research, onsite optimization and link building are all crucial aspects to web marketing. Taken as a whole they will greatly increase the presence of a website in the various search engine rankings. That should be the goal of every website on the internet.
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