Quit Wasting Time on SEO

Now hold on… Before you think I’ve lost my mind, notice the title doesn’t say “Don’t do SEO” or “SEO Doesn’t Matter.”  In fact, spending quality time on SEO is anything but a waste of time.  It’s no secret that search engines are the primary source people use to find your site, and it’s also true that if you’re not ranking pretty high in the search results for your relevant keywords, you’re not going to get much of that traffic.  So SEO is unquestionably vital to your site’s success.  But which areas of your site’s pages should you be focusing on to improve your SEO?  If you focus equally on everything you can, you’re going to be wasting your time, because the truth is, some areas just don’t matter as much as others.  While people have different views about which areas are most important, most agree that there are 5 critical areas you must nail to really have a positive effect on your SEO, so here they are:

1. Content - Well, duh, right?  As is often said, content is king.  That’s not only true for keeping people coming back to your site - it’s also true for SEO purposes.  Search engines love fresh new (relevant) content.  There are a lot of bloggers who post infrequently and sporadically, and they’re just not doing themselves any favors from an SEO standpoint.  Relevance is another important issue when planning your content.  There are blogs out there that are mind-blowingly broad in their content topics, and this makes them less attractive to the search engines.  If you have posts about software, nutrition, politics, celebrity gossip, and how to do origami all on the same page, chances are you won’t rank high for any of those topics.  The exception might be a news site that already has substantial traffic, but even those tend to categorize their content both for better readability and SEO performance.

2. Keyword Frequency - The trick for some people is to balance quality, well-written content with keyword frequency.  This shouldn’t be hard though.  If you’re writing about a topic and you’re going to cover it well, you’ll naturally use your keywords in your writing.  One thing you can do though is scan what you’ve written and change some wording to other keyword variations - as long as it doesn’t make your writing sound dumb.  For instance, in this post, it would be fine to mix it up and spell out SEO as “search engine optimization” now and then, as long as it flows and doesn’t detract from the writing.  But it shouldn’t be obvious that you’re optimizing.  That’s annoying to read (even if it’s an SEO blog about SEO), and your readers - who want to learn about search engine optimization - will not tolerate it, nor will the search engines who you’re trying to search engine optimize your search engine keywords for in your article about search engine optimization. (SEO)

3. Title - Your title tag (or post title for a blog) is an important consideration for a couple of reasons.  First of all, and perhaps most importantly, you want to give your readers and idea of what the page is about.  In doing so, you’ll no doubt use your target keywords in your title - which is the other important aspect of title tags.  This makes perfect sense.  When people get a long list of search results, what do they do?  They scan the titles to find the result most relevant to their search.  So you’re helping yourself by helping your site’s visitors when you optimize your title tag with relevant keywords.  Also, for search purposes, try to keep your title under 72 characters.  That way the full title will show in search results.

4. Meta Description - Following your page’s title in the search results is the page description.  There are varying opinions about whether using keywords in your description meta will improve SEO, but it’s still something you want to pay attention to.  Why?  Because even if it won’t help you get ranked higher, it will increase click-through rates once you are ranked.  After scanning titles of search results for relevant content, searchers read descriptions, so even if you have the perfect title, the proper description will validate and cement their decision to click through to your page.

5. Links - Search engines believe (if a computerized algorithm can believe something) that the more connected you are, the more relevant you are.  So both incoming and outgoing links matter when it comes to SEO.  Outgoing links can be to other sites with related content or to relevant internal pages.  This basically tells the search engine, “See - what I’m presenting must be relevant.  Here are other sites and pages talking about the same thing.”

Obviously, like I said in the beginning, there are a lot of other areas that can affect SEO, including H1 tags, link alt tags, image alt tags, keyword meta tags, etc.  But if you want to spend more of your time running your business, focusing on the above five areas will improve your SEO without wasting your time.

Four Optimization Truths

Website optimization should be an ongoing process and should be the subject of attention for every webmaster, regardless of the size, authority or age of the site itself. From a business development perspective, optimization is a “must do” activity within the online marketing arena. Feedback and interaction are essential ingredients for any business and without it, it is difficult to change with the times and to grow. For an online initiative, interaction and feedback can be difficult to achieve without making a concerted effort to gather it. As such, even if your site is in the very early stages of development or growth, optimization should be embraced.

Truth number one: you have more to gain that you have to lose. It’s no good assuming that you can just tread water until such time as you might have “more information” to work with, on the assumption that relatively low levels of traffic do not provide you with enough material. With even a relatively small amount of information, you can attribute leads to certain sources or conversions to certain actions and while you might not have the luxury of multiple methods of testing to see whether your assertions may be backed up, you can nevertheless focus on your positive areas as you are feeding new growth and not waste money during your delicate formative times.

Truth number two: you cannot do business unless you optimize, one way or another. Any marketing action of any kind is a process of optimization. Just doing business by placing an ad in a particular format, in a particular place and waiting for results, you have a set strategy. If your traffic levels are really low at this point you still need to record the results of your individual initiatives and develop your ongoing strategy accordingly.

Truth number three: you have plenty of tools to help you at every traffic level. We have advocated before that Google’s Webmaster tools are quality products that every site operator should familiarize him or herself with. The analytics program has a wealth of information, allowing you to drill down to analyze your traffic sources or set up conversion goals. Their optimizer duration calculator allows you to input different scenarios and see how long you could expect to wait before you achieve realistic results, based on your data.

Truth number four: you can always analyze something. If you do not have a significant number of conversions yet for a particular campaign, be aware that you do not have to have an A to Z breadcrumb trail to enable you to make some assumptions about your overall business. You can, for example, take a look at the way that people interact with your site, the pages that they jump to, your entry pages, whether they are getting to a particular page during a checkout process and then bailing out. Just because you do not have a cash conversion does not mean that you cannot make any changes to your site infrastructure or its logistics to better prepare for those converting days ahead.

What Optimization Truths have you discovered?

Matthew Toren

3 Simple SEO Tips for Your Website

We have received a handful of emails asking us to explain the basics of SEO, so here goes! All of you SEO Guru’s out there, please bare with us as we tackle the basics.

If you already have a website, you probably spent either a good deal of time or money (or both) getting it set up so that it represents your company in the best possible light. But design is only part of the equation for successful online business. In this age of technology, small business owners need to have at least an elementary grasp of what it takes to keep them competitive on the internet.

So, let’s start with the basics. I am sure you’ve heard the term SEO before! SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and it is a method for ensuring your website is properly “optimized” which helps with your ultimate goal of having your website appear at the top (or as close as possible to it) of a search engine’s results.

If you go to Google.com and type in the phrase “Web Hosting”, you’ll get literally hundreds of pages of results. However, most internet users are not going to search through all of them. They’ll look at the first and possibly second pages of results. That’s it. So if your web hosting company comes up on page 35 of the Google search results, it may never see the light of day. How can you get your website to come up closer to the top of the search engine results? That’s what SEO is all about!

Keep in mind that there are professional SEO writers who can revamp your entire website text to get your website on the right track; but if you are not interested in paying someone to do it for you right now, here are three handy “DIY” SEO tips that you can use to tweak your own website:

1. Select Your Keywords Wisely

Keywords are what SEO is all about. These are words, terms, and phrases that are used when people search the internet for a specific subject. Generally, the more specific the keywords, the better; for example, if you sell real estate you don’t just want to set your keywords as “real estate” or “home buying.” There are hundreds of thousands of other sites that use these same keywords and you will not stand out as unique just by using them.

What you want to do is figure out what makes your business unique, and form keywords based on that. So, for example, “Topeka Kansas real estate” is much more specific and will help people who are searching for a home in Topeka find your site quickly.

2. Use Your Keywords in all Areas of Your Website

This means using your keywords in your meta tags, your navigation buttons, your main page text, your files and folders, and your links. Obviously you need your website content to make sense, so simply repeating key words over and over again is not good form; plus many search engines are programmed to avoid sites that are obviously trying to cheat the system by using nonsensical text just for SEO purposes. But careful placement of SEO keywords in all the areas of your site can strengthen your website’s search-ability and this is the essence of Search Engine Optimization.

3. Get Linked!

In addition to keywords, search engines look for websites that have many other websites linked to it. If other websites consider your site an “authority” and are linking to it then it automatically gains a higher ranking in the search engine. You can get other sites to link to you by simply requesting it from the site owners. Often they will want a reciprocal link from your site to theirs and this is a good way to build online relationships.

You can also list your site in search engines (free or paid) and develop your online social networking tools. For example, you can create a Squidoo lens about your company’s products or services and link it back to your site.

These 3 tips are just the beginning of what can be done with Search Engine Optimization and they are simple enough for any small business owner with access to their website. However, if you are interested in really making SEO work for you, I recommend hiring a professional; or at the very least, developing your knowledge of online marketing and web tools.

Now, any of the SEO experts out there, please feel free to jump in and comment on any other details that may be helpful to our readers. Thanks!

Some excellent reading around the subject:

Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grappone

Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization: Drive Traffic, Boost Conversion Rates and Make Lots of Money by Jon Rognerud

SEO Made Simple: Strategies For Dominating The World’s Largest Search Engine by Michael H Fleischner