Details about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Writing an introductory post about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is quite difficult. At best, SEO is a multi-headed beast that will take some time to learn to tame. At worst, it’s a never-ending and changing labyrinth that will leave many of you puzzled and perpetually confused.

SEO is 100% about getting your site to rank well in search engines, more specifically in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Since Google is currently taking about 65% market share in the English speaking search market, your efforts should focus there. Incidentally, Yahoo and MSN are shifting their search engines more and more to act like Google’s, so your efforts with Google will actually make a pretty large difference with the other two.

Before we dig in, let’s set the record straight. You aren’t going to learn to use SEO to create traffic in one day. You’re going to have to test and then test some more. I’ll lay out the course, but you have to do the lab work. I can’t do that for anyone.

This lesson will break down the basic concepts that you will need to learn in order to create traffic with SEO. I’m simply not going to cover stuff that doesn’t make a difference anymore, so you may notice that concepts you’ve learned in the past aren’t here. Here are the basic ideas we’re going to talk about:

Onsite Optimization

Optimizing HTML Titles
Optimizing Page Content
Optimized Tagging
Optimized Linking Within Site
Offsite Optimization

Basic Overview Of Offsite SEO
White Hat Link Building
Grey Hat Link Building
Black Hat Link Building (not recommended)
Most people I have met focus on the on-page stuff and honestly, that doesn’t do a whole lot for you. You can tweak and test your on-page optimization all year and you’ll never see much improvement.

Google puts a lot more emphasis on the links pointing to a page than they do on the content that appears on the page. In other words, a worthless page with links pointing at it is more likely to rank well than a great page with no links pointing at it. That said, great pages usually attract links so the great pages usually have more links than worthless pages and Google operates on this principle.

Onsite Optimization

This part of the puzzle is actually very easy. Follow this simple walk-through and you’ll be done with your onsite SEO. Of course, you will need to do it for each page you’re trying to optimize:

Make sure the keyword you want to rank for is in the HTML title tag of the page you’re trying to get to rank well. The page will rank fine if the keyword is in there by itself and it will rank well if the title also contains other words. Seriously, either way is perfectly fine - just make sure your keyword is in there.
Place your keyword two or three times within the content of the page you’re trying to get to rank well. If you have more than 500 words of content on the page, you can use the keyword four or five or even six times. Now, all of you detail-oriented people out there will be trying to nail down exact numbers here. Don’t. Follow the basic guidelines and that’s it.
Use your keyword as a tag at the end of the article. If you use WordPress or Blogger, tagging is quite easy. If you use something else, you’ll have to create tags manually. Tags are actually just links with a special piece of code on them. If you have to create them manually, here’s a Tag Generator you can use.
Edit some other pages of your site and create links that point at the page you’re trying to get to rank well. Use your keyword as anchor text in those links. The more links you point, the better your page will rank.
Onsite SEO isn’t rocket science. Those are the only concepts you need to know.

Offsite Optimization

Offsite optimization, or offsite SEO, is simply the optimization that happens off of your site. Search engines primarily use links to determine which pages to rank in the best locations. It’s very much a popularity contest. The pages with the most links will rank the best.

When Google finds two or more pages on the same topic, they will examine each to find out which is the most popular. The page that has the most or best links pointing at it will be chosen by Google as the best.

There are some different factors that Google uses to determine which links are the best links but this isn’t rocket science either. Links from better sites are better links. Basically, a link from your Grandma’s knitting blog won’t count for as much as a link from The Wall Street Journal would. Additionally, links from related sites will help you more than links from sites that aren’t related to yours.

Anchor text, the text that links are made out of, also affects search rankings significantly. If you get a link that uses the keyword you’re trying to rank for as anchor text, it will make more difference than a link that uses something else as the anchor text. A related anchor will help more than a unrelated anchor.

White Hat Link Building

White hat link building is the kind that Google is 100% ok with. You’re very limited in what you can do if you want to stay within what Google wants.

If you’re going to try to stay white hat, you can basically create killer stuff on your site that will get linked to naturally. It’s ok to let people know about it and it’s even ok to ask them to link to it.

With white hat, your site will only gets links that it deserves because of the content you’ve put together.

Google has also said that it’s ok to submit your site to online directories, so this is ok. However, manipulation of anchor text when you submit to directories wouldn’t be ok if you wanted to stay totally white. Google has explicitly warned against linking techniques that manipulate search rankings. To stay white, you would have to submit to directories using your site’s name as the titled anchor text.

Grey Hat Link Building

Grey hat consists of almost all of the link building the most SEOs use. Link trading, keyword-using directory submission, article distribution, and site-interlinking would all fall into the grey.

Almost everyone thinks these techniques are 100% ok but they actually aren’t. Many people get away with most of them but the honest truth is that they are definitely grey area. Google and other search engines would prefer to not see any linking techniques that manipulate search rankings and these clearly do.

Many SEOs use grey hat techniques but you will have to decide what is and isn’t worth the risk for you.

Black Hat Link Building

This is the stuff that falls way outside the guidelines set forth by Google. This is the spam-farming, comment spamming, and hacking that many black hats actively participate in. I personally would never get involved in this stuff because unless you’re very advanced, you’re more likely to get banned than you are to succeed at it.

There are still a lot of black hats making money, in fact one of my sites is currently competing against quite a few black hatters. Since this is a very bad idea for most people, I’m never going to talk about these methods and would never use any of them myself. I simply see them when I’m looking at my competition.

SEO In A Nutshell

SEO is getting the right words on the page and then building the right links to point at the page. If you’re getting out-ranked, you’re probably getting out-linked.