All your SEO questions answered – for real – by an expert in the field
I’ll admit it: SEO is one of those buzz terms that I claim to completely understand yet still feel a little fuzzy about – OK, well really fuzzy about. And I’m willing to bet that you have similar feelings. Experts say that SEO is the major difference between an amateur website and an uber-successful site, but if you’re like me you’ve found that most resource for SEO basics are just elaborate sales pitches that promise to reveal the big secret if you just pay $49.95 via PayPal. Yikes.
So I decided to cut through the bull and talk to SEO expert Kaila Strong – yes, a real live SEO expert! – about what SEO is all about, what the basics are, and how to make it really effective for your website or blog. Kaila is the Social Media Architect for Vertical Measures, an Internet marketing company that specializes in SEO. She has been kind enough to share her extensive knowledge on the subject with us to clear up all those nagging questions – thanks, Kaila!
Now Let’s start breaking this mammoth concept down…
What is SEO, Really?
Aside from being a nebulous Internet term and oft-used sales gimmick, SEO is actually a straightforward formula for how to get your website or blog to the top of the search engine results. In case you don’t know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search Engines, like Google, MSN, and Yahoo, are the top way users will find and navigate to your site if they don’t go directly to your URL. For example, the majority of the traffic for The Life Uncommon comes from people directly linking to TheLifeUncommon.net, however the next largest source of traffic is from search engines.
According to Kaila, roughly 200 million search engine searches are performed each day, which yield search results that translate to more traffice for your site. And traffic equals ad revenue, service or product purchases, and more respect in your niche. Therefore, every day you have 200 million reasons to make sure your site is Search Engine Optimized.
In the simplest terms, Kaila says that “SEO is the process of molding your website to conform to search engine guidelines, thereby facilitating the ease with which their algorithms can determine what your site is about.” Once it understands your site, it can understand when to return it as a search result. The better it “understands” your site, the closer your site will appear to the top of the search results, which is what we all want.
SEO Basics
To “understand” your site, search engines pull information from the three “meta” tag categories that are part of your site’s behind-the-scene’s code. These tags don’t show up on the front end of your site that you view through a web browser, but they are visible to search engines, robots, and other automated crawling programs.
The meta-tags are included in the meta-title, the meta-description, and the meta-keywords. But don’t let these differnt categories fool you – the name of the game is all keywords all the time. A keyword is a word or phrase that is used to categorize your site, and when a user performs a search that includes one of your site’s keywords it will appear somewhere in the list of the search results. For example, some keywords for The Life Uncommon are “nacie carson,” “the life uncommon,” “uncommoners,” “entrepreneur,” “time management,” and “productivity.”
Choosing the keywords you use on your site is an important task that requires a good deal of research. You need to find words or phrases that have a high search volume and accurately correspond to what your site is about. One of the best ways to get a sense of how many people search for a particular word or phrase is through the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This little gem allows you to input a set of words or phrases and then returns the average monthly global search volume – the higher the volume the better a keyword it is. It also provide synonyms and related keywords to help you use different and more effective keyword combinations.
One of the reasons I love this tool also is that it allows you to input a URL and see what keywords the Google search engine associates with your site. This is a great check to help you tweak and improve your keywords to make sure you have the best ones for your site. For example, if you want your keywords to be “money,” “business,” and “power,” and the AdWord tool says that it picks up “Easter bunny,” “chocolate,” and “milk,” for your site’s keywords, then you know you need to do a little SEO work.
Applying SEO
At this point, you may be wondering what SEO work actually entails. Optimization of your site requires you to make sure that your meta-title, meta-description, and meta-tags contain the keywords you’ve selected, and contain them consistently.
“The keywords you choose to be the identifiers of your site should consistently show throughout your meta information as well as your content,” Kaila says, “Consistency is key. The last thing you want to do is confuse search engines.”
Optimizing your site for search engines also means building external links through commenting on other blogs, providing links to your site on social media platforms, and creating content on other sites that links back to your main site.
While this main seem like a lot of work, there is method in this madness. Kaila told me that, “if your site is credible and popular, then others will link to you. This is the premise that search engines are basing their results off of. In essence, the more links back to your site, the better.”
Essential Optimization
When I asked Kaila what she would consider to be the most important thing a webmaster could do for their site regarding SEO, the answer was simple: keywords, keywords, keywords. “Re-evaluate your keywords and make changes on-site to your meta-tags and content. This is the area that most people forget about. Oftentimes, your site focus changes, and so do the keyword identifiers on your site. Keep in mind that search engines like consistency, so if you do change your keywords do so gradually.”
There is no doubt that SEO is an integral part of every website’s success. In the second part of this series, I’ll get down into the nitty-gritty and tell you exactly what you should and should not put in your meta-title, meta-description, and meta-tags, as well as share some expert wisdom from SEO master Kaila Strong.
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great ideas, but how about just not blog for the day you have nothing to say…
quality over quantity!