Or, How to Use Google Magic to Increase
Your Rankings and Traffic for Free
Search is the primary source of site traffic for most companies, and a solid Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is the only way besides luck to increase the quality and quantity of that traffic. If you want to consistently show up well for more than your company name, a significant but reasonable SEO effort must be taken. Doing so can increase your site traffic for years, without the repetitive cost of pay per click campaigns. On the other hand, if you make no effort, you won’t rank high enough and your traffic can nosedive, especially now with Google Instant Results and more reliable results meaning few people click below the 5th position and the second page is nearly useless.
What determines Search Engine Result Page ranking?
Every time we search, Google uses the keywords we’ve entered to try and find what it thinks we’re searching for. It does so by examining the relevance of both site and individual page content to the search phrase we enter. It considers the weight (or importance) of each site, determined by its inbound links, traffic and social linking. A very basic, broad indicator of a site’s weight is its Google PageRank.
The Google PageRank formula is ridiculously complex.
There are many things which influence how a page or site ranks. The amount of competition for each keyword can vary dramatically, and can drive down your rank. Newsiness – how recently a page was first created matters, especially now with the Caffeine algorithm which affects 16% of all searches, according to Google. The click behavior of each user influences ranking as well, as Google tracks your use by logged in Google users, as well as IP address. If your company searches for its own site again and again and clicks every time, you make it show up higher on your computer than what it does to the rest of the world. If you searched for your company name and never clicked, your site will show up ranked artificially lower. Location, especially your country and what town your IP address says you are in, play a part, although location clues in the search also matter. Google knows what to do if you search for “Hotels in New York”.
How to choose what keywords to target for SEO
Unless you have money to burn, you will need to stick to 3 or 4 carefully selected keywords. The primary means of evaluating keywords is KEI (keyword effectiveness index), which compares the number of local (US) searches to the amount of competition, enabling you to get the most SEO bang for your buck.
Relevance is important, as the highest KEI term is typically too broad to apply to just your business. You need to balance KEI versus relevance to make sure that most people searching for your selected keywords would want to visit your site. Localization (adding state and city names before or after terms) is also helpful, if you can show up for low KEI but very specific and relevant terms. Long tail keywords will be discovered in this process, showing other semi-relevant and less popular terms that you can work into the site and can bring in up to half of your traffic.
How to SEO site content
As far as SEO goes, content is king, and growing in importance. Your primary goal should be to create engaging content that visitors will find genuinely useful as this is the best way to increase links and traffic.
Judicious use of keywords helps, but should never be forced. Keyword stuffing is bad, and can be detected by Google and users. If your content reads naturally then it’s fine. As far as keyword inclusion goes, page titles are extremely important, as are section headers (which should be in H1, H2, or H3 tags).
The further through a page’s content you go, the less important it is. The earlier content, like the first 20 words on a page, are much more important than the tenth paragraph. Link bait is really good too, as it interests or angers people, either way getting a lot of links and traffic.
The description and keyword section of the meta tag is near useless, aside from the description often displays at least partially in search results.
How to use link building to build SEO
To help boost your ranking, links must be non-reciprocal. If you link back to a site that links to your site, it destroys the link’s value. Chaining won’t work either. But a sophisticated link exchange program involving dozens of sites can work if you know what you’re doing, although whether it is worth the effort depends on the weight of the sites involved.
- A sample link-map of a small network, showing how link juice boosts sites, for example site B and E.
Site and page weight are extremely important, and each page on a site has its own weight. A PR 7 (Google PageRank 7) site linking to you is worth dozens of PR 2’s. The linking site’s relevance is also very important. If you run a beauty salon blog, 100 links from llama farms are either going to do nothing, or actually harm your site. Worse yet, pay for 5,000 junk links from non-relevant sites (which is very black hat) and you will likely have to scrap your site, make a new one and pray that Google will let you get back to zero so that you and an reputable SEO agency can rebuild (that was the exact opposite of fun).
The keyword of the anchor link (what the typically blue, underlined link text on the linking site says) should be relevant, and if it’s a target term, even better. Link building agreements and services are a good way to build links, and many use social bookmark sites to make sure they’re indexed. Link building services comes in two flavors: more DIY ones of varying reliability (Build My Rank and Linkvana are decent) that cost hundreds to several thousand, and large companies (such as Slingshot SEO) that execute a strategy and provide other services and do an excellent job but require a minimum contract of around $100,000, which is a serious chunk of change. Additionally, social media links and traffic aren’t typically counted as links, but are used as an aggregate indicator of importance as far as weighting.
How to optimize site setup and architecture
The most important thing you can do is use clear text on your site, using text instead of images wherever possible. Page URL’s should be SEO-friendly, as in site.com/parts/blue-car-widgets/ instead of site.com/?article=1037. All images need to be described using the alt tag, adding relevance, keywords and the possibility to show up in image searches. Avoid Flash when possible, and make sure to describe any Flash content.
Sitemaps and especially sitemap feeding plugins are very important, notifying search engines of new pages and getting them crawled.
Make the site non-duplicating. Either the root (preferable) or www should be the only subdomain, with one of these forwarding to the other. Additionally, rel canonical tags in your code can tell Google which version is the preferred, simply telling Google “this is the URL you should index me as”.
