Introduction to SEO 101

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – is the art/science of optimising your website to rank high in the search engines for keywords/phrases that are relevant to your site.

The idea is simple really.

If you’re an accountant based in Perth who wants to get more visitors to your website (hoping that some of those visitors will turn into paying customers), you’ll ideally want to rank highly for search phrases such as: perth accountant, accountant perth, tax accountant perth, etc.

The IDEAL situation is for your website to rank in the number 1 position on Google (Yahoo and MSN/Bing) for these (and similar/related) terms, and thereby get LOTS of “free” visitors to your site, of which some turn into clients.

SEO is the art and science of achieving these sorts of results – “optimising” for the “search engines” – hence the term “search engine optimization.”

So, with the ultra simplistic introduction over and done with, let’s move on to the basics of  SEO.

There are 2 key elements to SEO:

Onsite factors and Offsite factors.

Simply put, onsite factors are those things you do to your website to make it “optimised”, and offsite factors are those things you do away from your website (offsite) to increase its optimisation.

Let’s break these 2 factors down and look more closely at them.

When it comes to onsite factors, it refers to things such as:

• title tags
• headlines
• meta tags
• keyword placement

and so on.

BIG SEO SECRET REVEALED:  Your SEO consultant probably doesn’t want you to know this, but it’s true!

These days, onpage factors are pretty simple to work with, mainly because Google rules the search engine universe and a LOT of the stupid old spammy techniques used in the past no longer work!

Google decides what your website is about by browsing through it and storing the text and image/video/audio info on your site into its gigantic database. At this level of technology, text is the most important component, but in the near future, video and audio’s influence will increase.

Think about how YOU work out what a website is about… you read the text on it, look at the images and (sometimes) review the video/audio. The words have meaning for you, as do the pictures and media content.

Google does much the same thing, except that it’s a computer, so it isn’t “intelligent” (give them time, it will happen!) It doesn’t really understand the difference between a cat and a dog at anything more than an dictionary definition level.

HOWEVER, Google is perhaps the smartest dumb computer network in the world, because it understands words and their relationship to each other. It has millions of rules it follows that allows it to receive information and make some sort of sense out of it. How else do you think it knows what answers to give you when you use it to search for information.

This is why websites that put important text into graphics (mostly in an attempt to look stylish…) lose out with Google. While your eyes allow you to read text in a graphical format, Google can’t do that, so it misses out on important information.

Important takeaway: Make sure you use plenty of text explaining your site’s message, so Google can actually figure what it’s all about…

Now, onto the offsite factors.

The key element here is links!

Links pointing at your website from outside your website.

In Google’s eyes, a link is seen as a vote of popularity for a website (or a specific individual page on a site), and if you have enough QUALITY links pointing to your website, Google will see that as a high enough vote of popularity for your site that they might rank you higher than another site for 1 or more specific search terms. The site with the most and/or best QUALITY of links will usually outrank sites with lesser quantity/quality of links (there ARE exceptions to this rule, but as a generalisation, it’s fairly accurate).

To further complicate matters, the text in the actual link itself can also add ranking power to a website.

This example link:  Search Engine points to Google.com. BUT, the words in the link (search engine) also tells Google that this site/page has some relationship or relevence to “search engine”.

You could have a link pointing to a dog training site, or a link pointing to an indoor cricket centre and in each case, the link itself not only gives a “vote of confidence” to that site, but the words (dog training & indoor cricket) actually tell Google what that page is about, in general terms.

So, the offsite secret to growing your rankings is to get as many links as necessary but also (ideally) have appropriate keywords in those links that explain what each page they’re pointing at is about.

THIS is the bit that’s much harder for non-SEO trained people to do. In many cases, sites may require hundreds, if not thousands of links to boost their rankings for popular keyword phrases, and it’s a very time consuming job to get those links, so it could take months or years of part-time effort to find and set up all those links.

PLUS, there are lots of little convoluted, complicated, wierd rules that need to be followed when it comes to link building. The foremost rule is “Don’t p*ss Google offf!” and unless you’re already an experienced SEO consultant, chances are you’ll blow things big time trying to get your own links, and wind up having your website banned from Google’s index.

Trust me, you do NOT want that to happen! It’s the SEO world equivalent to suicide…

OK, well that’s enough for your Introduction to SEO 101 lesson. There’s a lot more that could be said, but for now, this article was just meant to be a primer. I’ll write and post new articles expanding on the topic soon, as well as videos (once my throat has recovered from the flu and I can talk without having a coughing fit!) to expand on this ultra-simple introduction.

Tagged As: google, introduction, optimization, search engine optimisation, SEO