Choosing keywords wisely is the first and most important part of any SEO campaign. It can mean the difference between 100 visitors to your site and 1,000. Business owners know their products and services inside and out and can forget what it’s like for an average consumer trying to find their service. An example we like to use is of a gentleman who owned a manufactured housing business. He didn’t like the phrase “mobile home.” But guess what the common person searching for his services called it? A little bit of research shows that there are an average of 36 times more searches on Google daily for “mobile home” versus “manufactured home.”
This happens more often than not. Business owners become too close their products and technical terms. It’s always a good idea to ask around and brainstorm with people who aren’t so familiar with your business. Ask them what words they would type into Google to find your company. Then do some research, or let us do it for you, to see which of those words are being searched for the most. You don’t want to miss out on valuable traffic from the most popular keywords.
The myth that SEO is snake oil is one that is prevalent among people who don’t fully understand it. SEO is an industry that is still very new and not generally understood. It can appear to be magic when a site shows up on the front page of Google that wasn’t there last week. Even though we don’t know the search engines’ exact algorithms for ranking pages, there are straight-forward methods for increasing a web site’s chances of ranking well.
The first, and most important, aspect is recognizing the best keywords for your market. This is true even off-line. Using the best words to catch people’s attention in Yellow Pages ads, billboards, etc. is important to get the best response. These keywords can make or break the amount of traffic to your web site. Doing some simple research will reveal which keywords are best for your site.
Next, including those keywords on your site lets Google know that is what your site is about. Google doesn’t understand context, it only reads what is on your site. You can think of this as putting up signs in your store to guide people to certain items – “women’s clothes, automotive supplies, shoes, etc.” Of course, if you overdo it, and repeat your keywords too many times, you will annoy people who will move on to another web site.
Finally, you want to create more ways for people to find your site by building links to it. There are hundreds of ways to accomplish this. Google views sites that have more links to them as more important. When you build links to your site, you are essentially putting up signs to help people find you easier. The easier it is for people, and Google, to find you, the higher you will appear in the search engine rankings.
That’s really what SEO is about. None of this is magic or snake oil. It boils down to recognizing what people are looking for and making sure the search engines know that’s what your site is about.
The world of Search is changing at an ever increasing pace. With services like Facebook and Twitter offering access to information as it happens, search engines are feeling the pressure to provide the freshest results for searchers. For the past few months, Google has been working on a technology upgrade to provide the fastest results. Many people, such as Ben at Mashable, have done tests between the old and new versions of Google. It’s obvious the new Google is much faster. There is also an emphasis on the newest/most recently updated results. For example, results from social media sites are ranking higher because they are frequently updated.
What does this mean for you? This means it is becoming so much more important to update your website on a regular basis. Search engines want to make sure your site is the most relevant result it can provide to searchers. Changing some content, or adding what’s new can help. Having a blog on your site is also a great way to keep adding content and to keep it fresh. Of course, all of this content must be on topic and relevant to the traffic you’re trying to pull to your site.
Search engines want to provide the most relevant information in as little time as possible. Hopefully their push for higher speeds won’t detract from their relevancy. As a website owner, you can work to provide fast and relevant content for searchers to find.
