The Mysterious Magic

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the act of designing and building your websites in such a way that the search engines react to it positively.

When I first began my online marketing business, I sort of looked at SEO as some sort of mysterious internet voodoo. I just couldn't get a grip on what I was supposed to be doing to achieve a site that was optimized for the search engines.

When I did try to make some changes that were supposed to help my sites rank better, I usually saw very little in the way of results. What I later realized is that it really wouldn't have mattered what I did to those sites because I was trying to compete in ultra highly competitive markets.

These were markets where there were very established players that had expert staffing that made sure their sites continued to rank at the top of the search engine results (SERPS) for very competative keyword terms. My brand new little site was not about to come along and knock them of the charts. They have achieved authority status.

This was about the time that I learned one of the most important lessons I have learned about marketing online. Choose your market and the competition within that market wisely. Take Google for example, there only 10 positions available for search results on each of their pages. Being shown on the first page of Google's SERPS can mean the difference in boom or bust for an online business. So you can imagine how fierce the competition can be.

Analyze your competition and be certain that you have a reasonable chance of winning the search engine ranking battle. You do this with the type of market research that I discuss in the niche research section of the Net Biz Boardroom site.
SEO requires effort and there is no sense (or profit) in wasting your time by fighting a war you can't win.

SEO Breakdown

So what is SEO anyway? There are certain things you can do on your web pages and there are certain things you can do off of your web pages to optimize them for the search engines. We refer to them as on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

The search engines have determined that there are certain things about your web page that they will weigh when evaluating how they will rank your site. They have setup algorithms within their systems that tell them if any particular website has what they are looking for or not. They do not disclose how these algorithms are setup, but by back engineering how sites seem to rank well, we know what some of these algorithms are.

It is important to note that not all search engines have the same requirements for ranking sites. Most optimizers shoot to give Google what they want and then hope it is enough to rank well for the other search engines as well. The name of the game is relevance. Google wants to give the searcher what they are searching for. Seems simple enough right?

We must also realize that search engines change their algorithms from time to time, so we must keep abreast of these changes. This is another reason why SEO can be some very time consuming work.

On-Page Optimization

Here are the things you can do on your webpage;

Domain - Select a domain that has your main keywords in it. If you are marketing basketball hoops, and you have decided that "basketball hoops" is your main keyword phrase, then register a domain with that keyword phrase in it.

Page Title - Use your main keywords as a title on your index page. So in my example my main page (index.html) would have a title of "Basketball Hoops".

I would also create additional webpages that would be titled with my secondary keywords. So my main page would be "Basketball Hoops", but I might also have additional pages titled "indoor basketballs", "outdoor basketballs" etc.

Page Description - It is also a good idea to make sure you are using the
keyword(s) in your page description. This appears in the search engine results as shown below. So use this description to "sell the click" to your site. In other words create enough interest in this short description that the web searcher will want to click through.

Below is a search engine result from a Google search for basketball hoops.
 

You will notice that the keywords "basketball hoops" are shown in the Title, Page Description and the Domain. Notice how each time the keywords are shown, they are in BOLD. This helps to draw the searchers eye to the listing and reinforces to them that the listing is relevant to their search. This equates to more clicks.

Webpage Content - You will also want to insert the keywords into the content of the page. No need to overdo it here. It used to be a common practice to stuff the page with your keywords and that was rewarded in the SERPS. That is no longer the case. I make it an objective to mention the keyword with a density of four to five percent. So for every 100 words of content, I will make sure that the keywords appear four to five times. Please note that this density rate is for pages on my site and not article submissions.

If you have selected a keyword or keyword phrase with very low competition, then the four methods of optimization I have just listed can often be enough to land you a first page ranking at Google.

Continued on page 2

SEO Strategy pages   1  |  2  |  3