How many times have you scratched your head in amazement over the results your competitors are getting in the search engines for key terms that you are trying to rank for? Don’t worry because it happens to all of us. The fact of the matter is that SEO is not rocket science; and anyone can learn it if they take the time.

Since the adoption of broadband internet is growing exponentially across the world and consumers are using search engines for researching products and services; the competition to attract their attention has also grown exponentially. For this reason, it’s important for businesses to adopt an SEO strategy if they wish to succeed with their internet marketing initiatives. The opportunity cost of ignoring SEO is missing out on a mass influx of highly targeted web visitors that statistically tend to convert higher than do visitors from paid search; as well as a multitude of other revenue opportunities.

SEO Defined – so you can understand what you are up against

SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization is the simple process of creating and/or editing a webpage in a way that allows it to perform efficiently in the search engines; such as ranking high for targeted keywords. The end goal of SEO is to generate more traffic for a website; with a secondary goal of increasing conversion rates. A conversion rate is the percentage of consumers that perform a particular task while visiting a website and/or blog. A task can include a purchasing a product, filling out a form, downloading a white paper, or any other action that a marketer deems important. Typically, website visitors that click on a natural search result tend to have higher conversion rates. There are two basic concepts of SEO; on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

On-page optimization – Caution, some knowledge of HTML is required

Title Tag - The title tag is one portion of all the meta-tags on the page. It’s not visible to your website visitors unless they read the top portion of the web browser. However, search engine spiders look at this to help determine relevancy. It is important that whatever keywords that you want to rank for; you include those terms in the title tag. Be careful not to over do it and flood the title tag with hundreds of keywords as it is considered spam to do so by many of the search engines. It’s better to focus on two or three keywords. For example, if you are trying to rank for the following terms (DVD, Buy DVD and Rent DVD, cheap, inexpensive) your title tag might look something like this:

Buy or Rent inexpensive DVDs from Rentdvd, Inc at a very cheap price.

Notice that the keywords are before your company name. It’s important to have the keywords that you want to rank for first so when consumers search for those terms, they can see them in the search results. Data proves that there is always a higher click through rate when searchers see the keywords they are looking for in the actual search results.

Description Tag – the description is not as important as it used to be; but the tag actually describes to the search engines the content on the page. In the above example, your description tag might look something like this:

Rentdvd, Inc. offers consumers a choice to either rent or buy inexpensive DVDs at a very cheap price.

Notice here that the description tag is basically replicating the title tag almost word for word. The above example is just one idea; however, you can use whatever other messaging you feel is important, as long as you use the keywords you want to rank for.

Keyword Tag - There used to be a time in internet history when webmasters could add hundreds of keywords in this tag and rank number one for all of them. Not the case anymore. However, they still do hold some weight. In the above example, the keyword tag should look something like this:

DVD, rent DVD, buy DVD, cheap, inexpensive

It looks as if I only added a few keywords; however, the search engines are smart enough to use variations of each word in your keyword tags. Therefore, search engines can extract the following variations: DVD, rent DVD, rent cheap DVD, rent inexpensive DVD, etc.

You will often hear or read that meta tags are no longer effective as they used to be. While it is true that they don’t carry the same weight, you will never find a well optimized website without it.

H1, H2, H3 tags – also known as the heading tags. The ‘H1? tag or the header is probably the most significant body tag on a web page. It tells the search engines what the main headline of a web page will be. It should compromise of the targeted keywords that you are trying to rank for. The ‘H2’ and “H3” are respectively sub headings to the “H1” tag.

Internal Anchor Text linking - Using internal ‘anchor text’ linking throughout your website is important. It helps the search engines index (or find) all the pages on your site when they crawl it; and also helps identify content pages on your site linked from anchor text. For example, in the above example of RentDVD, Inc., perhaps they also sell/rent DVD players — in the content area of their home page they may write something like this:

At RentDVD, Inc. we also sell DVD players to our subscribers and will ship them to you free of charge.

Notice the term ‘DVD players’ is hyper linked (and should link to a page on your site about DVD players).

Site Map – a very important task and often overlooked. A site map serves two purposes. It increases the usability of your site; by helping them quickly find what they are looking for; and also tells the search engine spiders about all the other pages that you have on your website, so they can all get indexed in the search engines.

Good content - good, quality content which is appealing to the viewers is indispensable. Good content can also be referred to as Link Bait; and Wikipedia describes it as any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites; more about link building next.

The second step is off-page optimization (aka Link Building)

There are a number of things you can do “off your website” to improve your natural search engine results and increase your visibility in the search engines. These factors normally include the number of external websites that are linking to your website. This is commonly referred to as link popularity.

Think of it like this; it’s a pretty easy concept to understand: the more external websites that link to you, the better. The caveat is that these sites have to be relevant and credible. And, according to the search engine gods; you cannot buy these links or you will suffer the consequences of being damned to hell.

Each link to your website from another website is considered a “vote” for your site’s content. For example, if you sell dog food products and other “dog” related websites want to link to you — these links would be considered credible, reliable and relevant (as long as you don’t pay for them of course).

Link Building – link building is time intensive, frustrating and sometimes confusing. There are several ways to build one way (or inbound) links to your site. Here are a few examples:

• Article Syndication - marketers have been using article syndication (sometimes referred to as article marketing or content distribution) to promote their product and/or service for several years now. Article syndication naturally creates inbound links assuming that the article is good quality and worth reading.
  
  
• Press Release Optimization & Distribution - a well written, fully optimized press release can earn you not only valuable media attention and new clients, but also increase your legitimate inbound links.
  
  
• Blogs - The search engines value blogs because they are often updated with fresh and dynamic content. The more you post content, the more frequent your pages will be crawled by search engine spiders, and the faster the updates will appear in search results. And, naturally, if your blog is well written with engaging content, you will naturally receive inbound links from other bloggers. You may have to link to them first.
  
  
• Social Media – it would be wise to also participate in social media; and leveraging sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, etc. This will help your content travel across the internet, especially if you add social bookmarks to your site/blog. This concept is known as social media optimization and should not be ignored in your SEO strategy.

Anchor Text – basically, anchor text is the visible text in a hyperlink. For example, if you want to rank for the term “Rent DVD”, you will want other websites to link to yours in the following fashion:

Rent DVD: RentDVD.com offer a wide selection of DVDs for you to rent from.

Keep in mind that the term “Rent DVD” is the clickable term that will link directly to your site. It would be even more effective if a site that is linking to you is doing so in an editorial or blog post; but these are hard to come by. Additionally, when building links to your site, it’s important to vary your anchor text and descriptions; especially if you want to rank for more than just one keyword.

Word of Caution

Be careful of the websites that offer you thousands of inbound links for a low monthly payment of $19.99. This is spam, it DOES NOT work and could get you banned from the search engines. Take the time and learn about SEO. There are a ton of articles, blogs, and tutorials on the subject. The time investment is long; but the return is valuable.

BIO:

Michael Brito is a Sr. Manager of Community Marketing at Yahoo! Inc. He has over 10 years of direct marketing experience in driving customer acquisition, retention and engagement through social media and other online media channels to include search engine optimization, paid search, display advertising, word of mouth and generating buzz. He also writes about social media marketing in his marketing blog in his free time.