SEO – From 10,000 ft.
SEO. What is it?
Search engine optimization is, quite simply, optimizing your website to be more searchable by search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Here’s a pretty good definition of SEO:
Search Engine Optimization is the process of building, designing, creating, or updating a website, or its contents, in order to increase visibility within search engines, and improve placement on search engine results pages, for a desired set of keywords terms or market segment.
What does it do?
Search Engine Optimization increases your chance of attracting new visitors to your website by placing it higher in search results. The search results we’re talking about could be “sponsored links”, which are paid advertisements, or “organic links”, which are everything else you see on the results page.
How does it do that?
Well, the optimization in SEO applies to many different parts that make up a website. Each of which needs to be created and structured in the way that is preferred by search engines. Most of this hinges on the quality of your site content. Engaging content that attracts visitors is essential to web marketing success. Your content must use keywords within it to build relevancy to the words people will search on to find your site. It must also have a structure that is easily searchable. Once you have good content you can build the other parts of your website and SEO strategy around it.
These parts fall into two buckets:
On-page:
The actual parts of your site you can see, the coding that makes it visible and organized. These include:
- Site architecture – the pages and how the link to each other
- Information architecture – how your content is divided and linked
within the site - Keywords – their placement and density
- Title tags – the visible title of each page
- Meta tags – additional descriptions of your content
- HTML tags – the structure of your content on the page
Off-page:
Content and links coming from outside your site. These include:
- In-bound links – links from other sites that find your content useful and recommend you to their audience
- Social Media links – self-promotion links within communities such as Facebook and links from others who like your content and pass it on to their networks
- Paid search – pay-per-click advertising, such as Google AdWords, that attracts site visitors through keyword search
All of these parts need to be tuned, or optimized, to the algorithms used by search engines to decide which web page, of the billions that exist, is most relevant to what the user is searching for. Algorithms you say? Higher math? Yes, the voodoo behind search engine technology is the algorithm which decides the relevant quality of one web page or another. That’s how they end up in those tidy little lists. There are hundreds of variables in these formulas and they are closely guarded secrets. No-one knows but gurus on the mountain.
Some of these things, such as Title Tags, are common sense strategies and are included in what Hero calls Foundational SEO. These strategies should be part of any professionally build website. We’ll elaborate more on Foundational SEO in a future post.
Other SEO strategies, such as Paid Search, require greater insight and on-going refinement to create real value. We call this Extended SEO and it benefits greatly from the focused attention of a contracted specialist who can monitor performance weekly and make the necessary adjustments. Hero works with several SEO specialist who can provide this kind of Extended service for sites our studio has built.
Does My Website Need It?
Yes. Every website needs some level of SEO. For our clients, we recommend building sites with our Foundational approach. Based on industry best practice, this builds into the site all the basic elements needed to perform well in search results. It also prepares the site for more advanced optimization in the future. Making a website successful in SEO is like baking bread. Once you mix all the ingredients together, you have to let the dough rise for awhile. New websites need time to rise, too. They need time to collect data on who is visiting, how visitors are finding you and what content do they like best. Once you know those things you can move on to more ambitious SEO strategies.
Where Do I Start?
Now that you’ve got the ten thousand foot view of SEO don’t loose it. It’s easy to get caught up in the minutia of click-throughs and conversions but don’t let those distract you from the big picture for long. Start at a manageable level of complexity, review your site data regularly and publish quality content. Doing those things you will find website success. Should you discover you need some assistance along the way, give us a call, we’d be happy to help.
Very nice information. Thanks for this.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
Like