Sensible SEOIntroductionSEO described in one letter is S.
Many will claim this is because it involves sorcery and snake oil, however, in this guide I'm going to help you understand the real meaning behind the S' of SEO. They are your guide through the process of SEO, they determine what you'll be doing, why you're doing it and how you're going to do it, in short: They are everything you need to know. It's that Simple.
So why listen to me? Well I've been through this before. I created and still run a high traffic website (http://img718.imageshack.us/img718/1030/analytics.png). As the image shows I get more than half my traffic from search engines. It also shows, that the amount of visits I get from search engines ranks in the millions, this did not come without me learning something.
At the moment I spend my time working for BananaBit Hosting (http://www.bbtn.us) as the technical guy doing servers as well as a technical advisor to our clients. SEO does not factor in a lot in my current work, but there is still contact with users. I've always enjoyed talking with my users and as you shall see in this guide I consider that a big part of my success.
Before We StartSensible,
sustainable and
safe. These are the keywords for what we will be doing, keep these in mind whenever you do SEO work and you are already half way there. Once you become familiar with doing SEO the proper way you will automatically follow these keywords without thinking about it, and all because it will make Sense.
- Sensible SEO is SEO which makes sense immediately. It's based on simple logic and with only very little guesswork.
- Sustainable SEO is SEO which has a long term effect. It ties into the sensible logic and works with the search engine to create trust and dominance in a niche instead of against it.
- Safe SEO is pretty straight forward. It's safe. By working with the search engine instead of against it you avoid the shady practices which gets you penalized or outright dropped from the index.
And the best part is that I don't need to teach you any of this, because you already know it. All I'm going to do is skew your perspective a bit and you'll be a SEO master in no time. Either that or the fact you won't have to work with snake oil since it can get quite messy.
Thought ReframingThe first step in becoming a SEO master is to move away from the snake oil and sorcery. SEO is not a black arts. People will have you believe it is, but consider their motives, either they want to sell you something which will make SEO easier or they have been mislead by the formerly mentioned business men.
If someone is trying to sell you a SEO product then it is their job to make SEO seem as complicated as possible, because that way they make more sales. Luckily, we're sensible and intelligent people, so we're going to take a step back and consider just what SEO is.
Search Engine Optimization. So our goal is to rank well on a search engine. To do that we need to know how a search engine ranks sites, sadly, this is a well kept secret which we're probably never going to learn of so we have to do a small bit of guesswork here. Thankfully, we're not only sensible and intelligent, but we are also logical people - therefore we know that
the job of a search engine is to provide the most relevant result to a users search query.Did you catch that? The secret to SEO is in that one sentence. A search engine will rank a site by how relevant it deems the site to be for the user. So we have two aspects now, we have a search query and a user. These are the two things we need to optimize for. Forget all about the search engine, it's a super smart robot and it's loads better at analysing and seeing patterns than any human being will ever be. Trying to optimize for a search engine requires sorcery and snake oil, because you're trying to game the programming behind it. - programming done by a lot of really smart people with really long educations. Does that sound like a battle you want to fight? To make matters worse: It's code, which means it's changeable at a moments notice. What you did last night might not even be effective this morning.
So repeat this to yourself a few times: "Users and queries."
Now we have a
sensible basis to optimize against. Users are human beings, we know how human beings behave because we are human beings ourselves. Search engines will try their very best to give us what we want, so we have to use this knowledge and provide users with exactly what they want!
We also have a
sustainable basis because human needs does not change very often, our behaviour and actions often have basis in the same emotions and thoughts.
And most importantly we have a
safe method to use because we are working with the search engine by providing it quality content to show it's users.
Do you believe in the 3 S' yet? If yes then congratulations, you now understand what you have to do and why you are doing it. I told you it was simple. The fun is just starting, though, we still have to cover the how.
Users, Queries and ContentOkay, lets take another step back and do some more reasoning. Search engines shows a user information based on a query. This means that we have to let the search engine know what our site is about, we need to pick out queries which are relevant to our content and optimize for these queries.
You probably already have some idea of what these queries are, but I can tell you right now those queries are wrong. You're new in this game, you're competing against big sites with lots of money and lots of time on the internet. You have no basis for ranking for those keywords! It's the most common mistake when choosing keywords, you're being too general, you might have a site about dogs, but so do a thousand other people!
You need to remember that you have competition, you must beat this competition before you can rank for your chosen queries. That takes a long time and requires a lot of creative work to get done. The easier solution is to choose keywords with less competition, instead of wanting to rank for dog, then rank for dog food, dog care or dog training. The more specific you get the less competition there's like to be. Naturally, the more specific you get the less users there are going to be for that query, so you need to strike a balance between amount of users and ranking competition. For this you need Google Webmaster Tools. It has very recently gotten and update and will now show you the quantity of searches for your ranking terms as well as your click-through rate and ranking position, it is quite simply an invaluable tool for doing search engine optimization for Google users.
When you have your queries, which I will call keywords when in the context of your content, then it becomes time to make sure your content reflects this. This means you must have proper HTML code, it has to validate! Use the <p> tag for paragraphs and the strong and emphasis tag to put weight on words for instance. And above all, your title tag and headers must be spot on! These are the words your users are most likely to use when linking to your content, and this leads us to the most important S of SEO.
SocialAs I've said quite a few times by now, search engines ranks content for users, users are human and humans talk. Our single biggest strength is that we communicate, we have always done so and will always continue to do so. Search engines LOVE communication, when you tell your friends about something over Facebook or Twitter I can guarantee you that search engines are there watching. (if your privacy settings allow this, of course) When you write on your blog about something, the search engine is there watching. When you Digg something, bookmark something in delicious or write a comment on a forum, the search engine is there watching! And we have to take advantage of this.
The most effective thing you can do to improve your ranking is to create social buzz outside your site. When you can forget about your site and allow other people to talk about your content on their own sites then search engines will see you as the dominant force in the niche. You have become the centre of attention, the source people talk about. You are what users are interested in and search engines will rank accordingly. It's that simple.
Of course, this is again easier said than done, creating buzz is often hard if not seemingly impossible. It requires a previous unheard of integration with social services and a creative mindset in content creation and promotion. Essentially, SEO is today about studying human behaviour and exploiting that behaviour to build buzz and links.
In my next post I'll go into details on how to generate links, working your way up to better keywords and what to do once you rank well for keywords, because as simple as SEO is, it's only a small part of the game and there's much, much more to learn.
It's probably going to be a little while before I get the next part done as it requires lots of thought and editing to write out this type of posts, so ask any questions about this part and I shall try to answer these and use it in my next post. Thanks for reading.
A good read so far and you took some of the magic pixie dust of what SEO is away for me 8)
Really nice reading. Thanks for share your vision of it Ensiferous. I will wait for updates on this!