Simple SEO Basics

Getting started with SEO "Search Engine Optimization" can seem like a very big task. The truth is that by taking small steps you can go a long way in a few months both with ranking well with your site and learning SEO. The basic of the trade is that there is no secret sauce no matter how many sales pitches you've seen online. Most of it is actually about making sure your site is up to speed with the demands of search engines and working hard on getting links pointing to it. This guide focuses on 3 areas, in order, keyword research, on site optimization and link building. All three equally important but link building the part that will demand most effort.

Keyword Research Basics

The first step of every successful SEO starts with Keyword Research. You need to know what keywords you are going to chase to get the right traffic to your site. Notice "Right" as just much traffic usually doesn't cut it. You usually want visitors that convert into customers, sign up for your newsletter or any other goal you might have. Having the top spot on "SEO" will do you no good if you are selling shoes, even though it's a high demand keyword. To get a good estimate of the number of visitors you can get within a segment a good place to start is Google's keyword tool in your AdWords Account. It will show you numbers of searcher per month (remember to set it to exact match type). These numbers aren't 100% accurate but they are usually good enough. If you want more accurate numbers run an AdWords campaign for a week with a very high budget and you'll see the real numbers.

Once you have the data you can sort through all the suggestions you've found on your topic. The ideal keyword is a keyword with high demand, that is very close on topic to your product or service, that has in itself a call to action and that has low competition. The truth is that very few keywords can live up to this so you'll usually have to choose a few or get the second or third best.

Let's take use a book on SEO for example.

• The keyword SEO has lots of traffic but is neither low competition or very close to your product.
• The keyword SEO Book also has some good traffic but competition is high and it lacks the determination to buy.
• The keyword Buy SEO Book has a much lower traffic but shows an interest from the searcher to make a purchase and has a lot lower competition.

For a new site or for an inexperienced SEO I would chose the third option. Maybe the traffic you will get never counts in thousands but hundreds are a good start and instead of bashing your head with the titans you make sure that you'll make money that you can invest in the tougher keywords later on. Once you have decided what the first keyword you are going to work with is, you can move on to the next section On Site SEO. If you are having trouble choosing a good way to think about it is to go for 2 or 3 word combinations and pick the ones that have words like Buy, Hire or similar in the phrase.

On Site SEO

When people think about SEO the On Site parts are usually what they think about. The truth is that when it comes to SEO the On Site is just the start, it's the basics that you need to implement before you can do the actual work. The next chapter Link Building is what will demand most of you and need more hours.

There are of course extremely clever things you can do on site but in most cases it is enough if you just get the basics down. That's what we are going to look in to here.

General On Site SEO

The General On Site SEO is that which is looking at the whole site, not just the page that you want to rank in the search results with. To be able to compete on less competitive keywords we don't need to do anything fancy here, just make sure that search engine spiders can crawl the site properly and that we use internal links in a good way. First of all, you have to refrain from using types of code and software that the search engines have troubles indexing. Usually this means all sorts of CMS:es and frameworks that doesn't create unique URL:s for sub pages on the site. Included here are:

• Frames
• JavaScript based sites
• Flash
• Certain types of Ajax implementations

If you use any of the above you will not get good positions. They are all elements that Google and the others can't index properly. It's not a problem to have a flash or JS element on a page, it's just having the site based on them that causes problems. The next step is internal links. The general advice is to have clear and short paths to all pages on the site.

How many clicks do you have to do before you get to the content you want ranking in the search results? As few as possible is the target. Most SEO:s make it that this means that you should link to as much as possible from the starting page of the site but this is not the right way to do it. Link to the most important pages and make sure you can also find the rest. If you are just targeting 1 keyword at this moment it's usually easiest to use that for the starting page.

If you are targeting 3 keywords, chose one for the starting page and a page each for the others. Make sure these pages have links from the front page.

Specific On Site/On Page SEO

Once you have chosen a page for your keyword or if you are targeting the front page for this, you can start with the specific work for this keyword. The basic idea here is to make sure that search engines have no doubt that the page in question is about this word or phrase.

You have to remember that search engines don't really read, they use indicators to decide the topic of a page. Among these indicators are:

• The words in the title of the page
• The words used in headlines
• The words used in the text
• The words in bold or italic
• The words in the Meta Description (notice that we don't mention the keywords tag, don't bother with it)
• Anchor text of inbound links, either internal or external

The trick here is to make sure you have the keyword mentioned in each and every one of these. The Pineberry Analysis Tool is a great resource for getting it 100% correct. It will tell you what you need to change and how important the factor is. Use the tool, correct the flaws and test again until you have a page that works good. It's not necessary to get a full score, good enough is good enough.

Link Building basics

Link building is the long and hard work of SEO. The goal is to get links from strong relevant sites with the right anchor text. If you sell used shoes a link from Zappos will do you a lot of good especially if it says "used shoes" while a link from a link directory saying "click here" won't help much.

What we need to understand first of all is that strong, relevant sites are just that because they in turn have links from strong, relevant sites. How many shoe blogs do you think links to Zappos.com? I bet it is quite a lot. The problem is that trying to squeeze a link out of Zappos might be a bit to tough and the same goes here as with the keywords, you'll probably have to settle with the second or third best.

A lot of SEO:s look a lot at the PageRank meter in the Google Toolbar. I'd advice you to skip that. PageRank is not all that important and there are a lot of other factors that I rather look at. Not all of them have direct impact but it will be better for you in the long term. Factors I look at:

• Is the linking site an actual Brand
• Is it being updated regularly
• Is it keeping outbound links to a minimum
• Is it ranking well for the keywords
• Is it sufficiently old

If you find a site within your segment that is all the mentioned, you have found your target. The only real question is how you get a link from that site. The methods for this are as many as there are SEO:s. My advice here is find a method that works for you. I'll just settle for mentioning a few methods that work for others.

• Call them and ask if they'd be willing to link to you
• Ask them how much you need to pay for an ad on the site
• Ask for a link exchange
• Write an article you know they will react to
• Link to them and make sure they know about it
• Offer to write a very good article for them in exchange for a link in the same article

As you might have noticed it's not so much about technology anymore when it comes to link building. Remember that you need to do this over and over again to get results so chose a method you are comfortable with.