SEO is about your customers not the search engines
Nope, we haven’t gone mad; search engine optimisation really is all about your customers.
Most SEO companies are now playing nicely and not condoning devious techniques such as link buying, hidden text and generally exploiting every loophole and short cut they can find.
Why?
Apart from the fact that they were attracting hefty penalties for their clients, they’ve now realised that search engine marketing is more like social marketing and everything must be centred around the customer not the search engines.To be successful on line today, your strategy must include not only general keyword optimisation for your website’s structure and content, it must also involve social media marketing aimed at your customers.
No, that doesn’t mean sending out a raft of marketing messages every minute in the hope that you’ll wear down your customers and make them buy from you. Instead it’s about engaging with your audience, providing them with useful content and information and optimising your web content to reflect your customers’ needs.
For many start ups all of this can be quite confusing so this 10 minute video by Maile Ohye of Google might help. In 10 minutes she talks you through some basic search engine optimisation techniques for start ups to help you get on the right track.
A facebook Business Page is great for your business.
Once indexed by the search engines, it gives your business greater visibility, you can tell your fans about special offers and events really quickly and you can engage with them. Plus, as there are 500 million users (and growing) on Facebook you can drive an awful lot of traffic back to your website.
And that’s just for starters.
But how can you maximise your chances of your Facebook Business Page being found in the search results?
Well, Facebook have posted a video on their website, created by Distilled.net, to teach you the basics of SEO along with a few suggestions on how to improve the ranking of your Facebook Page in the search engines. You can view it my clicking on the image below:
The video lasts about 7 minutes, but is well worth watching.
Distilled.net have also put together a PDF on SEO for Facebook Pages, which you can find here.
Link building is probably, the most important element in your search engine optimisation strategy.
Why?
Well, it is the most important factor Google uses when working out how relevant your web page or website is for ranking purposes.
When someone types in a search query, Google heads off to find the most relevant pages that satisfy the query. It ranks them in authoritative order and the factor used to determine that is, you guessed it, its link profile.
The ayes have it
Every inbound link that points to your website and web pages is seen by Google as a vote for it.
The more ‘votes’ it has, the higher its perceived authority.
The higher its perceived authority, the higher it’s ranking.
But not just any old links will do, Google’s far cannier than that. Every link must have:
Relevance – it must come from a site of the same, or closely related topic
Authority – the site should be seen as authoritative in its own right
Trust – the links pointing to the initiating site should be good quality links
So the key is to attract authoritative links from related sites. But how do you do that?
Attracting link love
Knowing you need to attract links is one thing; actually getting them is something else entirely.
Where do you start?
First, there are links from directory submissions, but make sure you opt for directories that are relevant to your industry or market.
Then you need to produce great content that people will want to link to. Generating a lot of high quality, useful information can be time consuming, which is why many companies choose to contract it out to professional copywriters. However it is created, make sure it offers expert advice, opinions, and demonstrates your authority.
Once this has got out into the search engines it may well attract links straightaway, but you may also have to do some legwork. If one of your articles compliments another authority site, get in touch with them and direct them to it to see if they want to link to your content.
You should also hang out on the same online forums as your target audience. This is a great way to interact with other industry experts and could lead to a few links.
Another method is by writing guest blogs and articles. Authority bloggers always need great content, so if you write something that’s targeted for their readers that’s well researched and put together, they will publish it and include an all important link back to your site.
Link building campaign
Setting yourself a link building strategy is vital as it should be an on-going process.
Your campaign should look at attracting:
Links from authoritative sites
Links from a number of different domains (50 links from 50 different sites is much better than 50 links from 1 site)
Deep links – i.e. not just linking to your Home Page, your other pages need links too
Anchor text links – where you keywords are used as the link text
Local links – don’t forget local directories and your Chamber of Commerce as they will help with your local rankings
But one word of warning, never ever be tempted to pay for links. This practice is well and truly frowned upon by Google and any short-term gains you may experience will soon be lost once Google discovers what you’re up to.
A natural link building strategy is by far the best way to go. Try to build your strategy into your working week to make sure it is a constant process.
Keyword density is one of those phrases from the past that should be buried.
In the bad old days of SEO (search engine optimisation), it was thought to be the best on-screen method of boosting your search rankings.
The problem behind this thinking was that if you had 10 instances of your keyword or phrase on your web page, but a competitor had 15, they would rank higher than you.
Can you see where this is going?
That’s right – the end result was a list of search results that took you to unreadable, unimaginative and very uninteresting content.
SEO the right way
Thankfully, most SEO copywriters today understand the value of natural copy that is written for the reader and not the search engines.
You see, if you write in a natural style about a particular subject, the keywords will appear and at a level that you would expect. The result is great information that is easy to read and that will help your on-screen SEO strategy.
If you think this is all stuff and nonsense and that having a certain percentage of keywords is still the way to go, have a read of this from Google’s very own Matt Cutts (speaking at SXSW earlier this year):
“What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”
Be natural
So there you go, if you continue to over stuff your content with keywords it will damage your website in the long run as well as having an immediate effect on your conversion rate.
Browsing through this blog, you will come across numerouse posts about search engine optimisation covering a range of issues to help you get the most out of your online presence.
But there is one area that many people don’t even consider – your images.
Every reader likes to see a visual image. They help reinforce, and at times, strengthen the text you read. They can add excitement and impact to your copy, plus they have the added advantage of offering another way for people to search for your conten through image specific search.
To help you understand this concept further, take a look at this very informative post on TopRankblog.com by Ashley Zeckerman. According to Ashley…
Images are essential for both search and social media marketing with growing popularity as a social media asset. Long time image hosting and social network Flickr hosts well over 50 billion images and social media image sharing services like Instagram and Pintrest have exploded in popularity:
