SEO – Search Engine Optimization can encapsulate a lot of things for a lot of us. There are many optimizations you can make to your web content that will help search engines find them easily and more importantly, display them on top of search results.
In this article, I am going to break down SEO in its simplest forms; Content and Linkbacks.
1. CONTENT
This is what tells the search engines what your website is all about. What do you sell? What’s your idea? What’s your expertise or opinion? Search engines do so by figuring out what’s the most used word on your website. In fact, it keeps a tab of all words and how many times each one of them is used on that page. Which is why, when you start SEO, the first question asked is, “what are your keywords?”
Keywords:
Simply put, this is what people are typing in when searching for what you provide. You may be a veteneranian, but your keyword will not just be a veteneranian or a pet doctor or an animal doctor, but also all the common diseases that pets deal with. Location of your office or offices is also an important keyword besides other things. This is critical, so choose your keywords wisely, There’s some relief as Google and Bing provide you with keyword search tools.
Keyword Search Tools:
a. https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner
b. http://www.bing.com/toolbox/keywords
There are other tools, like
c. http://www.moz.com and
d. https://www.compete.com
These tools will help you gain some competitive intelligence too and tell you what keywords your competitors are using to drive traffic to their websites.
Word of Caution:
Remember, just because your website has lots of keywords, it won’t mean that you’ll start to show up in search results. In fact, be wary of overusing keywords. Google does not like being tricked. If it figures out and it does very quickly that you have stuffed the page with keywords, it may penalize your website by completely deleting that page or the entire website from its search index. Bad place to be in. So, optimize, but don’t over optimize.
If you want to show up high in search results, you must have high quality content. There’s no substitute for it. One clear indicator of high quality content is how many people have referenced your website by linking to it from their websites, blogs, social media sites etc. This constitutes, linkbacks.
Before we get to linkbacks, take a look at the “SEO Keyword Template” image. I created this image to give a visual reference of where keywords can be used most effectively.
2. LINKBACKS
This is what tells the search engines, how popular your content is compared to other sites that deal with the same topic. More linkbacks mean higher popularity and higher position in the search result display.
Another, Word of Caution:
Do not buy linkbacks, there are many who will promise 100’s of linkbacks for a few bucks. Google will figure that out sooner than later. Also, sprinkling linkbacks by creating dummy sites won’t help either, nor would commenting on public blogs in hope of getting linkbacks.
Linkbacks have to be earned through high quality content. Make your content compelling and unique that its readers can’t help but share. It’s easier said than done and hence this method works. Only the best content will bubble up.
Now there are actions you can take to make the sharing of your content easier.
How To Increase Linkbacks?
a. Write compelling content
b. Create engaging infographics. People like to share images, providing interesting infographics increases the chances of sharing. “SEO Keyword Template”, hopefully is one such image! Go ahead, share it!!
c. Distribute your content through different social media channels and blogs where you have a chance of finding more readers.
d. Find the right audience to promote your content. A great veteneranian is great only for pet lovers and pet owners. Post links to professional groups on Linkedin, meetup and other similar sites.
Concluding Thoughts
These are simple and time tested ideas to get you started on the right track. Following these tips will help you boost your search engine ranking and drive more traffic to your webiste. There are many other actions you can take to improve SEO. Broadly, those actions can be classified either as “on page optimization” or “off page optimizations.” I’ll talk about other methods of improving SEO in subsequent blogs.