What is SEO Marketing?
You may have heard the term SEO Marketing before, but never knew what it meant. SEO stands for “search engine optimized” and it means that website content is written and structured in such a way that it will have the best chance of showing up at or near the top results of a web search on a site like Google.
Globally, Google is the most popular of all search engines, for many reasons. For this reason, most SEO marketing is geared toward advancing a website’s ranks in Google specifically.
How does it work?
Search engines utilize specific algorithms to determine which websites show up at the top of their list whenever a search is done. While the search is partly based on relevance to the searched phrase, and partly due to popularity of the clicked links, there are other factors at play.
When Google searches the web looking for results to a query, it looks for pages that follow certain rules. The more closely a webpage follows those rules, the more likely it is to show up in the first page of the search results.
SEO marketing means packing your webpage with positive flags that trigger Google to notice that it is there and tell Google your page has value. Google ignores more websites than it posts in its result pages. SEO Marketing makes Google pay attention.
Why use SEO marketing? Is it that important?
Getting your website onto the first page of Google through SEO marketing techniques is very important to your page’s success, primarily because it is a lot like convincing Google to advertise your page for free.
Ask yourself this: when you have done website searches in the past, how often have you clicked anything beyond the first page of results—or even the top ten results? The answer is most likely “Not very often, if ever.” Therefore, SEO marketing is crucial.
Can’t I just use META tags and click-back sites to trick Google into ranking me well?
The first thing to understand is that Google does not like promoting clickbaiting or spam websites. Their algorithms and rules are very complex. They are not just interested in keywords showing up on your page—though that is one of the criteria. The META tags that were so useful in the early days of the internet are now all but obsolete. Google no longer cares about them.
Google is so popular because it has an advanced searching system. It’s simple to use, but it returns the best results in a large percentage of all searches, compared to other search engines. That means it is harder to get ranked there—and also more important.
When Google searches the internet for results, it not only looks for the keywords of your search, it also checks to see if your website is linked to from other websites. It checks how many other websites link to you and whether those websites are all related to your website or come from a variety of sources. It also wants to know whether your website provides a quality experience to visitors.
Google wants to know that when it sends a user to your site, that user is going to have a positive experience and wind up on a page that will help them in their query. There are many ways that it checks for this, but believe it or not, website design is a crucial element to this process.
In other words, if your website’s theme is stuck in the 1990’s, so will your search results be.
Your site must have actual content, not just a landing page. If your landing page is just an information dump, Google won’t like that, either. Your website’s landing page should have easily navigated links to other pages within your site. Those pages should contain value. If they don’t, Google is going to rank you lower than a similar site that provides higher quality content.
If your website is a legitimate business, then Google expects your webpage to reflect that. If you have a real business, offering a real service, but your website looks and behaves like the page of a get rich quick scheme, Google is not only going to rank you poorly, but might even penalize you for trying to trick them.
In addition to the advanced webcrawling search engine it utilizes, Google also has actual people visiting websites that show up in their search pages. If one of those people clicks your link and end sup on a monochromatic website with a huge font and content—albeit original—that is just variations on “Buy my service!” you will not fare well in Google rankings.
So how do I use SEO marketing to get Google to notice my page?
The first and most important thing you want to do is create fresh, valuable content for your website that will be of interest to readers. Google wants to see new things. If you are simply rehashing what another website said in a similar way, you will not get much of anywhere, with Google or with other websites on which you might want to get linked.
Every single page of your website should have good, quality writing, with information relevant to the topic. If you have a page on your site that’s just a list of keywords, Google is not going to pay attention—or they are going to pay you negative attention and penalize you, which is much worse. Instead, write real content, that utilizes—but does not over-utilize—keywords that people are likely to search in order to get the information you want to provide. You also don’t want pages full of market-speak and corporate filler.
Good content example: Are your rain gutters filling up with vegetable matter faster than you can clean them out? In the autumn, trees drop leaves at the rate of fifteen to twenty per hour. If your yard has a lot of trees, this can add up to a lot of leaves in a short period of time and you will need to get to get your gutters cleaned…
Bad content example: Need clean gutters? Our rain gutter cleaning service can provide rain gutter cleaning for cleaning out gutters. For cheap leaf removal and cleaning dirty gutters…
The next thing to do, once you have a quality website set up, is to get your site linked on other reputable websites. Reputable is the operative word. The worst thing you can do for your website when it comes to SEO marketing is to drum up unnatural links. In other words, links on websites that exist solely to link other websites. If you can get onto another website’s links page, that’s perfectly acceptable—and very good for you. However, using a paid service to get link backs is a bad idea and will hurt you in the long run. Instead, reach out to other well-reputed websites to discuss the possibilities of getting your link onto their page somewhere.
You should choose popular sites with which you are not in direct competition and which are related to your service or product. If you offer gutter cleaning services, in other words, a website devoted to ebooks is probably not the right website for you to approach. If, on the other hand, you provide resources for writers, a website about ebooks might be the ideal place for your link to get placed. If your link gets placed on a related website, it is more likely to score higher in Google’s ranking system.
There is no set number of links you need to have. It is more important, in Google’s eyes, for your link to be on a page with a good reputation. Get your link on a very good website and that might count as much as ten links on other, less reputable sites.
Another consideration is anchor text. Anchor text refers to the words used to link to a website. While you have probably seen many, many pages that use sentences like “For more info, click here” to provide a link, that is not the way to catch Google’s attention. The anchor text should always be of value. A better way to link would be to say something like “Read more about our gutter cleaning services.”
When you broker for links to your page on other websites, therefore, try to make sure that they also use some of the keywords people might look for when trying to get to the product or service you provide as the anchor text. In other words, the words they use when linking to you is almost as important as the words you use on the website itself. It’s also an opportunity to use different keywords to direct traffic to you without actually having to include them in the website content. This can be useful, if you want to bring in customers who are looking for a related service to your website.
For example, if you provide gutter cleaning services, you might also want to bring in people who are looking for lawn care, who might need but not be thinking about gutter cleaning. If the link on another website has text for your link that says “Lawn and gutter care” it can get traffic into your site when people look for lawn care that might otherwise not have seen your page—without providing false keywords on your own page.
It is also important to provide outgoing links to other related websites. Building on the example above, if you linked out to a lawn service, that would add value to the anchor text of the incoming link. You could even have an entire section of your links devoted to lawn care, so that you are providing something of substance to your visitors besides just your own service. A link exchange might be the best way to get other sites linking back to you.
You should provide links to your content on your pages, but do not be excessive. The links should be relevant to the content and pertinent to the topic. Use good anchor text and don’t link more than necessary within the writing itself. Providing a list of links at the bottom of every page—or a static frame with the links on it—makes your site more easy to navigate, but providing a link or two in a relevant sentence doesn’t hurt.
Another way to help your site is to make a site map, so that a visitor can easily get to any other page on your site from that page. Whenever possible, use anchor text instead of pictures. While pictures are more visually appealing, Google can’t read the pictures, so the pictures are not helping your site with Google, unless you put an “Alt” tag in the html, with keywords that Google can read. These aren’t weighted as highly as anchor text, but they are much better than pictures without the tags.
Within the HTML of your website, each page should have tags for the title and you should make that title as relevant to your keywords as possible. Rather than calling your page by the name of your company, consider something that explains the service you provide, such as “Fast affordable gutter cleaning services” which is exactly what someone is likely to type in if they are looking for those things.
Conclusion
To sum up, the best way to search engine optimize your site is to create a good website. Make it clear with your content and your links exactly what your purpose and intent is, why your website exists. If you are a small business trying to get customers, that should be clear, but you should provide more than a sales pitch. You have to give potential customers something of value, if you want Google to rank you well. It probably just makes good business sense to do that, anyway, but many people are so intent on getting their product out there that they focus only on sales and not on gaining the trust of the visitor.
Make a good website, provide keywords and links without being excessive, and get linked on popular pages. These are the basic rules of SEO Marketing.
Confused? Consider hiring an SEO Marketer to help you.
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