A website without search engine optimization is like a car without wheels. It doesn’t matter how pretty it is or how high-performance the engine, it won’t get very far.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has changed over the years. With Google becoming more sophisticated in ranking websites, tactics that worked just a few short years ago no longer are effective.
But many of the fundamentals are still the same. Google still wants to find sites that offer great content that is relevant to specific keywords. It’s just that they are much more aware of automated tactics designed to game their system and now they are much better at knowing the difference between good and just adequate content.
The bar has clearly been raised!
On-Page and Off-Page Optimization
There are two sides to Search Engine Optimization… what you do on your site and what you do off your site. Both are important, but what happens off the site, your backlink building tactics, is becoming more and more critical for high rankings on Google.
Relevancy Is The Key
Google’s main criteria for ranking is relevancy. The more relevant the page is to a search phrase (keyword) the more likely Google is to rank it highly in their Search Engine Results Page (SERP). So both On-Page and Off-Page tactics involve convincing Google that a web page is very relevant to a particular phrase. Click here to learn more about How Google Works.
But What Keywords Are Best?
Every keyword phrase has demand and competition. The Demand is how many people are using that phrase to search. Competition is how many websites are already competing for that phrase.
Good SEO starts with Keyword/Market Research to determine the demand and competition for a keyword. Ideally you want to find phrases that are in the “sweet spot” and have enough demand to bring real traffic but not so much competition that you can never get on the first page of Google.
Another factor is Buying Intention. Every phrase has an implied intention. Finding keywords that imply a desire to buy or solve a particular problem, means that visitor will be more likely to buy your solution. Our research helps us to identify those important buying phrases.
Every Search Engine Optimization campaign we do (in fact every website we build) starts with thorough research to determine exactly how high is the mountain that needs to be climbed to get on the first page of Google.
Once we know the optimum keywords, then we build pages and optimize around those winnable phrases.
On-Page Optimization
On-Page Optimization is making sure your main keyword is positioned in the right places on a web page. There are 4-6 important places where your keyword needs to be so Google can determine how relevant that page is to that keyword phrase.
Some of these places are in the HTML code and are never seen by your site visitors. But Google sees them because they see your Source Code. Right click on any web page and choose “View Source” to see what Google sees.
So, once the Keyword Research is done then it’s a matter of building each page properly. This includes putting the keyword phrase in these important locations.
- The URL
- The Title Tag
- The Meta Description
- The First Head Tag
- In “alt” text of images
- In several other places in the content
And continuing to build new pages is an important part of any On-Page Optimization. Google loves to see a site growing and growing. A static site that doesn’t change says “nobody’s home” to Google.
Off-Page Optimization
As Google analyzes a website it not only looks for relevancy it also looks for authority. When a website has a lot of other sites that link to it, that implies that the website is an authority in that niche. The more of these Backlinks, the more Google sees that site as an authority and then ranks it highly in the SERPs. Think of each backlink as a vote for that website. The site with the most votes wins the Google election to the first page. That’s why we call our services SEO Campaigns.
What Is A Backlink
A Backlink is when another website puts what’s called a hyperlink on their site. When someone clicks on that link it takes them to your website and perhaps a particular page on your website.
And not all backlinks are equal. A link from a high-authority site counts more than a link from a low-authority site.
How does Google know if a site is high-authority?
Google assigns a number between 0 and 10 to every website. This number is called Page Rank after Google founder Larry Page. It determines this number by analyzing the overall “web presence” of a site. This includes how many pages on a website, and how many backlinks there are to that website. Backlinks from high Page Rank sites count more than links from low Page Rank sites.
How Do We Get Backlinks
There are many strategies for getting backlinks.
- Create content (posts and comments) on blogs, websites, Web 2.0 sites.
- Create Pages on Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, Hub Pages, Xanga, Merchant Circle.
- Claim your listing on Search Engine local accounts (Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local).
- Get listed in Directory Sites (YellowPages.com, SuperPages.com, CitySearch, etc.)
- Write an article and submit it to article directory sites (eZineArticles, Article Marketing Automation)
- Put a video on video sites (YouTube, Vimeo, MetaCafe, etc.)
- Participate in niche groups and communities on Yahoo, Facebook, and others.
Obviously you can spend a lot of time doing all these tactics. Writing one original article and placing it on an article site can easily take an hour or more. Creating a one minute video, editing it, and submitting it to YouTube can take hours. But this is what it takes to get results and be on the first page of Google.
How Long Does It Take For SEO To Work?
For Google to find your site and index all of your pages can take a few weeks alone. Once it finds your site it will probably come back weekly so new pages are indexed relatively quickly.
Getting Backlinks and building up your overall link popularity, however take time.
Google must find these links on other websites and then follow them to you and then give you credit as a backlink. If those websites are only crawled weekly (or less) it make take a while before Google finds all your backlinks. Generally it takes 1-3 months before Google will improve your ranking based on your backlinks.
Depends On Your Competition Too
If you are in a niche and a location where the competition is very well optimized it can take a while to get on top of them. That’s why we do a thorough SEO Competition Analysis before we begin so you understand just how big of a mountain you have to climb.
Generally it takes 3-4 months to get on the 1st Page of Google if all tactics have been done diligently and your competition is not too well entrenched.
Why So Long?
Unfortunately that’s just the way Google works. Google rewards sites that are in it for the long haul and show consistent growth and a growing web presence. That’s why Search Engine Optimization takes time.
