Hi, this is Steve Wiideman SEO expert. Today I’m talking about search engine optimization, what is it? How does it benefit me? And how does it work?
Search engine optimization is the technique of getting higher placement in the natural search results of Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The search engines that matter the most are Google, the 62% market share, Yahoo with 20% and MSN floating around about 10% market share. So, that means the important search engines used should written out this point to be Google because Google obviously has the highest percentage of people that are searching the internet.
What you see here on the screen is a display of local search engine results organic or natural search engine results and paid advertising. Paid advertising really has nothing to do with the organic search engine results even though the aggregate is really the same. Today, we’re just going to be talking about organic search engine results and how you get higher placement. The goal here isn't just to get higher placement but to get more traffic to your website by getting higher positioning for keywords and have the most value to you, you’ll see over time by adding fresh content targeting specific keywords that you’re trying to get traffic from, you get more listings in the first position of Google and in the subsequent listings as well.
Having higher placement obviously is the goal. If you can get into these top five positions, you can drive a lot of traffic to your website assuming the targeting terms are actually drive traffic. Overtime because SEO isn't a fast overnight quick fix, overtime you can expect to get a lot of traffic from the search engine results as long as you’re nurturing a long term campaign for search engine optimization.
If done right, you will see a traffic increase from Google and Yahoo, that’s the exciting part. Imagine one day you’re getting no traffic and the next day you do a search engine optimization campaign by adding keyword targeted content and doing a few other things I mentioned in a minute, your traffic will increase naturally without having to pay virtually anything. That’s only going to grow as long as you set the right landscape. This particular website has had 189 visits during the first view of this site. The last review of this site, it had 253 visits just from Google alone, that’s pretty fantastic. And if they keep it up, that growth rate they can expect to keep getting more and more traffic from Google, Yahoo and MSN.
What’s involved in search engine optimization, there is two pieces, there is content and structure and website visibility. Search engine visibility which is really about getting you know mentioned on other websites and about links going to your site, it takes time and shouldn’t be done all at once. Doing it all at once basically raises the flag to the search engines that you're trying to manipulate their search results but done overtime and getting into the right web directories such as Yahoo and the open directory project can result in higher placement in the search results, press releases also play a role as long as you’ve got mentioning here and hopefully some links.
This particular site wasn’t set up with the optimal linking, however just having a link from a new site made a huge difference in terms of visibility. And also getting links from similar related websites can make a huge difference.
An example of how powerful online visibility can be from links alone is adobe.com. Adobe.com comes up number one for the search link click here, which if you’re reading the adobe.com page, you’ll see there was absolutely no reference of the search term clicked here, it just doesn’t exist.
So, why does adobe come up number one? That’s simple, Google is powered by how many people are linking to websites. The phrase that people used when this was first exploited it was called “Google Bombing” basically having hundreds of websites linking to a webpage with a keyword that your targeting. Google eventually figured out that people are trying to manipulate that algorithm and now they’re coming up with more scrutinizing criteria. So, adobe still ranks number one because there’s hundreds of thousands of websites linking to adobe with the search term click here to download adobe. That “Click here” is a link that’s actually drives that powerful search engine ranking and it looks like one billion search results. Adobe has the number one ranking for that search term. I’m sure that doesn’t have value to what their campaign is but it just shows you the power of links. Get enough links to your webpage and you can have higher placement for just about any search term you’re going after.
So, let’s talk about website content and structure. There are several different things that you can do to optimize your website. Your search engine optimization team should understand that the core fundamentals of building a website that not only has valid source code but also offers engaging content such as video, imagery, and so forth. And directly links Google to every single page on the website almost instantly. So, we don’t have to wait for Google to index your website, you can actually create in terms of structure and data feed, you can actually create a list for the search engines and say please index this content. That doesn’t necessarily help you with ranking higher for keywords but it does help to get those pages index right away.
The next thing that you can do to optimize it at the site level is to validate for broken links. So, we run a program just to make sure that there’s nothing broken on the website as Google is growing through. We want to make sure that they don’t hit any bad links otherwise they’ll drop off the page and just continue indexing it. Stripping out excessive source code from your website such as Java Scripts and styles and formats and using what we call a table list or cascading style sheet based, html code makes a huge difference. And not only the load time of your webpage providing a better user experience but also makes the website more into it if the Google as it’s reading through all of the links on the website hopefully we’re using static and textual based navigating rather than using images which can’t be read as well by the search engines, same thing for flash. You want to try to provide links that are made up of real words such as this one stop-foreclosure or pre-foreclosure California.
Again, you want to have an aging content such as video because as people choose your result and Google search results, and I choose your listing, they want to make sure that they stay on your webpage and they’re engaged by your content because if they bounced back, Google will record that and recognized it as not being as relevant of a website as perhaps some of the other search results. Then, there is something called “Page Level SEO” see we’re not on the homepage of this website right now, all right we’re on the foreclosure helppage here on Homeland Assistance. If I would view the source code of this particular webpage there are several different SEO focal points that I’m going to care about.
I’m going to care about not being explicit to the search engines. In other words I don’t just put the keyword I’m targeting in the title, I’m going to put some call to action and I’m going to put some value proposition to compel the person who finds this particular link in Google to be more relevant than the other listings that show up. I’m also going to try to use descriptions on each page individually that include call to action and talk about the keyword theme rather than just exploiting or stuffing the page with keywords. Heading has also play an important role in what you’re trying to do with your page level optimization.
For example, there is a tag called “AH1 or heading tag” each heading tag on each page should be unique. In other words, I don’t want every page on my website to have and AH1 as part of my overall, part of my overall heading. Some of the templates that are on the internet today create a template with an AH1 that is exact same for every page, you’re basically telling the search engines that every page on my website has the exact same heading. So, using the headings on every page or have your search engine optimization person and show that that is one of the criteria that they’re optimizing for.
Speaking of optimizing for search terms, one of the things that that your search engine optimization specialist should be doing is exhaustive keyword research. Understanding that the strongest most powerful keywords in terms of people who are actually searching and then creating categories around those search terms and then pages around the keywords that drive the most traffic.
Basically, this is a content tracking sheet. I’m going to have this particular client and make sure that we write content around each of these keywords so I’m going to have a page targeting foreclosure help in California and I'm going to write unique content, probably 4 to 500 words of content with video and imagery if I can find it.
Next thing is looking at overall website visibility. In website visibility, what we’re talking about is having mentioned and links from websites that make a difference. Such as a chamber of commerce, such us other websites around the internet that relate in one way or another to the website that we’re trying to get placement for. I'm not going to get a link to—assistance from an auto website, I’m going to get one from website set talked about foreclosures or have foreclosure in the title.
So, your internet search engine visibility specialist or link specialist or link building expert, their job is to try to get you the best links from websites that have the most relevance to you. One of the ways that we do that is simply by asking those websites that we find that could be a good place for us to get a link from to please add a link to our site. We don’t do that by creating reciprocal links or three-way linking or any kind of manipulation. We simply incentivize them. We compliment their content and we say “If you're interested because your time is valuable to us, we’ll buy you a cup of coffee or send you a gift card”. Search engines don’t see that as pain for influencing links, you’re simply going out to websites where it makes the most sense for you to get a link to your website and asking for a link. People are busy so by thanking them with a cup or coffee or something like that is a way to obviously get a very affordable link to your website from a page that has the most relevance for you.
So, your link specialist should be doing this day and night until they’ve discovered every single link that they need to get only from and try engage in a conversation with that person who owns the page. If done correctly, search engine optimization both on the content level by having structure organized balance content, keyword optimized webpages. Having really good internal linking structure for keywords that were optimizing for, overtime it can produce higher ranking in the search results. The keywords that matter to the people who are optimizing for their websites and can produce higher ranking in the search results overtime which produce more traffic from Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
Talk to your search engine optimization expert today about how you can rank higher for keywords that matter to you, I'm Steve Wiideman, SEO Expert. Find me online, simply by typing SEO expert or visit my blog at www.seoexpert.tV. Thanks for watching.
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