I haven’t wrote an SEO post in a while. Not because I don’t work with SEO anymore (far from it) but due to sharing all the information I’m preapred to share (see links below) :)
I wrote the below email to a potential customer who I’m in talks with to handle their SEO campaign (No, I’m not taking SEO clients on – this is a one off), so I thought it’s worth posting here for those that don’t really have an understanding of what SEO is and how an online business can benefit from working with SEO.
I want to start by briefly explaining what SEO is and why you should be taking SEO seriously.
Firstly, it’s worth pointing out the power of SEO that can drive sales and increase brand awareness. When someone actively seeks out information via typing keywords into a search engine, they are what some call “hot leads” These people are ready to either buy or learn more about a particular product. They have this product in their mind already. This is why conversions via search engine traffic outweigh any other form of marketing.
In order to start receiving traffic from search engines for keyword phrases that relate to your product, there are a few fundamentals to take into consideration:
- Making sure the search engines understand what your product is about.
- Convincing search engines that your web pages are what the user needs/wants.
How do we get the search engines to understand what your product is about?
The first is to get the site as search engine friendly as possible, by this I mean making sure the search engines can read and understand the content on your web pages. Search engines can’t read rich multimedia such as images/video and flash – this is why text, and lot’s of it, are much preferred.
The next step is keyword research. What keywords are best matched with your product? How many times do people search for these keywords?
Once we have a set of keywords to target, it’s time to implement those into the site (keyword density, titles, tags etc. etc.) so that when a search engines come along and crawl your pages, they’ll notice the keywords and get an idea of what your product/page is about. I say an idea, as there’s a lot more to getting a site ranked well within the search engines than just getting your pages search engine friendly with keyword optimized web pages.
Once the search engines have an understanding of what the product/page is about, it’s time to convince the search engines that the users searching for the keywords would be best presented with your site, rather than the others targeting the same keywords.
This boils down to getting votes from other web sites. A link is seen as a vote. Votes, or links, are all valued differently. No one knows the exact formula search engines use, although we do know that search engines give a higher value to links coming from established sites that are in the same niche/industry. We also know that the link must contain the targeted keyword, also known as anchor text.
Anchor text – this is the word that someone uses when they link to a web page. For instance, “This site has some great coffee recipes” – The underlined text (coffee) is the anchor text.
Let’s keep with the coffee theme. Let’s say we have a web page about coffee and it has 100 other web pages (either from the same site or other domains) linking to this page. 60 of those links contain the word “coffee” This will give the search engines a good indication that this web page everyone is linking too is related to coffee.
If the page everyone is linking to is targeting the keyword “coffee” and the owner of that page has already taken the steps I mention above (implementing keywords into code/content), the search engines will put two and two together and they’ll be a good chance of the site ranking well for this particular keyword.
Having a site that has the correct keyword density and all the tags in the right places is the easy part, the changeling part is to build quality links from relevant, established sites in the same niche/industry.
In order to stop spammers, the search engines are pretty clever at working out which links should receive more value than others. For instance, if your were to set up 10 new web sites about coffee, and link those to your site, the search engines would instantly see there’s no value (the site is new with no links pointing to it. Each link may be worth 1% value, whereas a link from a site that has been around for 5 years, has thousands of links from other trusted sites, could pass a value of 60%
So how do we get these links? Primarily from researching the sites we need links from and working out what they are currently linking to, and spotting gaps that we can fill in order to get those links.
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If you found the above interesting, you may be interested in other SEO articles I have written:
- My fav SEO podcasts (maybe a little out of date now as I don’t listen to any anymore)
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