SEO 101

Does your website rank number one in Google for desired keywords like your name and the name of your business? Does your business have an online presence that draws potential customers to your website? Is you website structured in a way that potential customers can easily find what they want? SEO is involved in all aspects of the above questions.

What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It also has been called search engine marketing and internet marketing. It is the marketing work done to help a website rank high in Google for a specific term. These specific terms are called keywords. Keywords are anything people might type into a search engine in order to find your business. If you are a Los Angeles headshot photographer you would want to rank high for keywords like “headshot photographer”, “los angeles headshot photographer”, “headshot photograpy”, etc. An aspect of SEO work is researching what keywords are popular and used more in search. Just because a search term is not popular, does not mean you don’t want to rank for it. The more specific the term, the more niche the market, which means less total amount of searches, but more that are probably looking for what you provide.

On-Site Optimization
As the term implies, this is the SEO work that is done on your website. The main components of on-site optimization are Titles and METAs, URL structure, and consistent content.

While Titles and META are on-site optimization, it is behind the scene work to give the search engines information about each page or post on your website. The above website was the first ranking on Google for the keyword “headshot photographer”. The title is the first line of information, and the first two works match the keyword. The last two lines are the short sentence description of the web page. The keyword is placed in the beginning of the sentence.

The second line demonstrates the importance of URL structure. Many times URLs do not give any information to the search engines. You want to set up your URL to be the title of the page or post because the URL will be connected with the keyword. The title of the above link starts with headshot photographers, so the page URL is “headshot-photopgraphers.php”

Google like websites to have recent and relevant information. Since the odds are you are not consistently updating your website pages, this is a great reason to have a blog. This can also be a place to craft your content to reach potential customers and use your keywords.

Off-Site Optimization
Link popularity is the work of Off-Site optimization. Google determines the more links pointing to your website, the more it is considered an authority on the topic. The factors that go into affective links is the anchor text and if the link is DoFollow.

The anchor text is the word(s) with in the link. Ideally you want the anchor text to match your keyword. Still using the above example, I would want as many links with the anchor text “headshot photograpger” pointed to my website, ideally pointing to the very “headshot-photopgraphers.php” URL. This how blogging can help. If you are creating great content, people are going to share it and link to it.

Not all links are created equal. The link must be a DoFollow link, which is a way to tell Google that the website being linked to is worthy of the credit. Most links in pages and posts are DoFollow links. Where this gets a little sticky is links in comments. Some wbesites have set up NoFollow links within comments, so they do not get spammed. So if one of your keywords is your name, and it should be, simply living comments is not a sufficient off-site strategy.

If you have any questions, drop us a comment below and we would be happy to help.