Well you may be wondering where to start. Like every great story, documentary, work of art, or instruction booklet, the answer is always, “at the beginning”. So, we start with the simplest of questions.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is making your page work for your users. Wait what? What happened to the whole search engine part? Oh right… technically, SEO is making your pages visible to search engines naturally. This means you are using unpaid marketing efforts, relying on your content, structure, and popularity to increase your search engine rankings and traffic. But it’s not just that – it is also creating content and information that is relevant to your keywords, and earning links to your site from other websites. Your keywords are the words on your page that you want to rank for in Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. For example, if you wanted to show up on the search engine results whenever someone types in the keyword, “red canvas shoes,” the content on your pages better contain info on red canvas shoes. Secondly, it’s going to need to gain some popularity by being linked-to from other sites. That’s where the whole optimization part comes in. Optimization means that you make all the little changes that affect your search ranking.
How do we do this?
Every good marketing effort starts from the same vein: good data and analysis. There are many analytics options available to web marketers, including Google Analytics, Mint, or something as simple as Quantcast. An analytics platform will allow you to analyze the traffic data on your website. You will be able to track what keywords they used to find you, so you can identify your top keywords. You will be able to see what city/county/state/country they are visiting from, so you can geo-target your demographic. You can see what pages/links/articles are the most and least popular, so you can make proper changes to draw-in more people. There are a plethora of ways you can segment your visitors, read your traffic, and determine your keywords.
After you have your analysis done, you want to take action. You want to build links to your site, using anchor text (words/phrases used in a link from another site) that hold your keywords. You want to make sure your pages have a reasonable density of your targeted keywords (without spamming them). You want a simple, easy-to-browse site structure, so search spiders can find their way through your site. An HTML site map (a page with links to your pages, internally) will also help draw out your site structure for users and search engines. Relevant content is particularly important, as well. You can’t just have a title/keyword for a “red canvas shoes” page that actually links to a page about blue oysters – this could be considered spam, and you will be penalized by search engines.
What is a conversion, and how does SEO have anything to do with it?
Traditionally, it is a term used in sales when closing a deal – “converting a prospect into a customer”. However, on the internet, the definition becomes more elastic. The ABC of sales is ‘Always Be Closing’. But, on the web, we can say, ‘Always Be Converting’. Your web conversion is defined by you, but it is essentially any measurable, desired/successful outcome of a visit to your website. Obviously, one conversion on an ecommerce site would be a purchase, but on something like a blog or other site, it could be how long a visitor stays on the site, a membership sign up, RSS feed subscription, how many pages they browse, how many ad impressions they face while on the site, if they share something on your site with a social media button, along with many others.
When doing SEO, you should always keep your conversions in mind. I always ask myself how my effort is going to help convert my visitors. Your content needs to be optimized and tested, so that once a visitor lands on your page (the landing page), that they are the most likely to perform your desired outcome. It’s NOT ENOUGH that they only visit your site. Traffic means nothing if you are getting nothing from it. Everything from the keywords you compete for, to the placement of your buttons and links will be major factors in your rate of conversion. So, always be testing. Always be optimizing. And, Always Be Converting!
So back to this whole SEO-is-making-your-page-work-for-your-users thing…
The best way to optimize is to make content that other people/sites will WANT to link to, and the best way to do that is make content that your visitors WANT to read, and WANT to share with others. I like to call it know-it-all-ism. Mankind loves to boast their knowledge – especially people on the internet. By nature, we want to be the first to know about something awesome, and then show off that knowledge. That’s why people share links on Facebook, why we create Twitter accounts, why interesting wiki facts and cat pictures with captions get passed around the office in emails, hell, it’s why I’m writing this for you.
In Conclusion (of Part 1)…
If you make content that your targeted users want to see, you will see natural increases in traffic, search engine rankings, and ultimately, conversions (as long as there are not too many steps in the way of them converting).
Now, this is NOT to say that there is no method to the madness. I may have oversimplified everything. There are certain truths and fundamentals to SEO, especially when it comes to conversions – I’ll cover this in Part 2, “The Basics”.
