The Four Fundamentals of SEO

SEO Made Simple, Part 3

Now that you’ve wrapped your mind around the concept of SEO and how your organization can benefit from it, let’s move on to the four core components of SEO.

1. keywords

   First you need to decide on a manageable number of keywords to target. I’d start with between 10 and 20, which you will eventually need to widdle down to between 4 and 8.

   Put yourself in your customers shoes. What keywords do you think they would be searching for in order to find your company or service. Be aware of that fact that the way your company and your employees refer to your product or service, may not be how your average customer refers to it (or searches for it).

   Not only do your keywords need to be relevant to your organization, it also helps to know how many times that keyword is searched for on a daily basis and how many other people are also optimizing their site for that keyword. You can utilize tools like WordTracker to find out this data. Ideal keywords are relevant, have high search frequency, and low competition.

2. content

   When SEO experts say “content is King”, they are basically saying useful, relevant content is suspected to be the most heavily weighed aspect in Google’s eyes. There are some special things your web page content must have in order to make Google happy. First, the content needs to be user-friendly, meaning it should be well-written for humans (not search engines).  Secondly, the content should include the keywords that you are targeting. Lastly, the content needs to be updated on a regular basis. If your site content doesn’t change very often, hosting a blog on your site is one way to have updated, relevant content on your site.

   Recently Google also started indexing video and photos. Appropriate (keyword rich) tags and captions are very important when it comes to video and photos.

3. site structure

   All websites share some fundamental structure. There are ways to alter this structure in order to grab Google’s attention. By altering page titles, H1 tags, meta tags, and URL structure you can make it easy for the Google spiders to crawl your site and index your content.

4. links

   Links are like a popularity contest in itself. Google figures the more other sites and people like your content and web pages, the more they will link to it, and the more valuable it must be.  The quality of the site that links to you, is also important.

   Be sure links to your site and within your site utilizes your keyword phrases. If your target is “retractable screens” then link to “retractable screens” instead of a “click here” link.

While these are the basics of SEO, there are more technical aspects involved, such as site maps and server settings, to name a few.  There are lots of resources on the web, along with numerous well-written books that can help you with mastering the art of  SEO. However, if you aren’t comfortable or don’t have the time to embark on a SEO campaign on your own, seek out the help of a professional SEO consultant or SEO service. We’ll talk more about this in part 3 of the series.