SEO Articles:

What is Search Engine Optimization?

How Keywords are used.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

It absolutely amazes me how many people have a business related website and have no idea what SEO is. That’s almost like having a business and not knowing the yellow pages exist. I go to conferences and seminars all the time and as soon as I say the term, It’s usually followed by a perplexed look and a “huh?” If you have a website that generates income or generates potential customers, SEO is something you NEED to know about.

How it all works.

Search Engines have programs that are referred to as spiders or bots. What these spiders do is crawl the entire web going from site to site following every link possible collecting information about every site on the web. Now, when these spiders crawl your site they are examining your source code and the code of sites that link to you looking for specific types of information. Sites are crawled very often by these spiders so the information in the search engines database is extremely up to date. Now that a search engine like Google has all this information about your site it needs to determine if your site is worthy of being indexed(link). Being indexed means you are actually in the engine’s database, if you aren’t indexed by the engine then your site will not show up for any results even if your exact URL is typed into the search box. Getting indexed by the engines can take anywhere from a few weeks to six months. This can be done much faster with some SEO strategies. Your site can also be breaking a particular rule which can result in it never being indexed, that is a whole other article though. Once you are indexed by the engine you are in their database, and will show up in search results. To determine your position for a search term the engine has what’s called an algorithm(link). The algorithm is the engines formula for determining how relevant your site is for that particular phrase.  The information collected by the spiders is then put into the algorithm to determine your position for that term. So then when you type in a particular phrase into the search engine it lists the sites in order based on the most to the least relevant, determined by the algorithm.

The Bad News.

Although the search engines have come along way in developing there algorithm’s they are still imperfect, after all it’s a computer determining results not a human. That’s why you could be searching for something like a site to buy a particular autographed sports paraphernalia and the results could show a forum posting about some guy rambling about how he bought this really cool whatever signed by whoever and not a site where you can purchase such a product. 

The Good News.

Since these spiders are computer programs we can use the imperfection to our advantage. Since we know what the algorithms value, we can cater our websites to the algorithm for whatever phrase we want. This will allow us to rank highly for that particular phrase. And since we can actually find out the exact phrases people are typing into the search engines, your website can rank high for customers that are looking for exactly what you are providing. This will bring your website the targeted traffic in needs to thrive organically.

That’s Search Engine Optimization.

How keywords are used.

It’s pretty much the first thing we look for when researching a site for the first time. If none of the traffic is organic it’s probably the reason why, for high rankings it’s crucial, and believe it or not some people don't even take it into consideration when designing a website.

It’s all about keywords.

Keywords are the exact phrases people are typing into search engines when they are looking for something in particular. For example when you were looking for a search engine optimization company you didn't go to Google and type in "Rank and Roll" you probably typed in something like "affordable search engine optimization company". For whatever market you’re in there are hundreds of keywords being typed in, but more than others.

Two kinds of keywords.

There are actually two kinds of keywords:

1) Main Keywords - This would be the most obvious search term that everyone in that market is fighting for. For example, let’s use the web design industry. The most searched term in that industry is the phrase "web design" that’s a main keyword. A main keyword is very broad and has a huge amount of competing webpage’s.

2) Long tail Keywords - The long tails are where your success lies, long tails are extensions of the main keyword. Even though a large amount of people are typing in "web design" everyday there is also a good number of people typing in more narrow phrases like "florida web design" or " website design Miami". These phrases are where you find a fraction of the competition and a traffic that is extremely targeted.

What now?

For most markets you are better off going for the long tail keywords, you can reach page 1 quite easily for these terms with the proper SEO and receive a lot of traffic. There are usually multiple long tails for your market and you can attack as many as you like. Once you achieve a high ranking for these long tails then you can use your momentum to go after the main keywords. At Rank and Roll this is what we do, we find these keywords for you and based on our experience we can determine which one's you can actually achieve page 1 rankings for.

How do you use the keywords?

Once the most effective keywords are chosen they need to be placed inside the coding of your website in certain places.  For example your most important phrase needs to be in your page title, as well as many other places. The keywords also need to be used when other sites link to you, if the text of the link pointing towards your site is a keyword your ranking for that keyword will increase.

A website that’s not built around the proper keywords is doomed from receiving any organic search engines traffic. Not only are you not receiving traffic, you’re throwing away targeted traffic, the best kind. If you want your website to thrive naturally, it’s an absolute must.