What Is SEO
July 9th 2009 7:00 AM
Categories: 
SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization, is a process that drives visitor traffic to your website. Its main objective is to achieve high search engine rankings for a targeted set of keywords and phrases.
Successful SEO is an excellent marketing tactic involving competitive keyword analysis, copywriting, and website development.
Why Is SEO Important?
Search engines are the largest source of internet traffic. Over 70% of all website traffic today is generated by search engines.
Over 90% of search engine generated traffic comes from the first 10 results of a search. This means to get a significant number of visitors to your website, you must rank at the top of search engine results.
Search engine optimization techniques place your website as high as possible in the search results to generate high visibility and a massive amount of web traffic as a result.
The most used search engines today are Google, Yahoo, and MSN comprising about 94% of all internet searches. Professional search engine optimization efforts should focus on these search engines to attract the widest audience possible.
If SEO techniques are not currently a core part of your online marketing strategy, you are missing an enormous opportunity to increase website traffic, lower offline marketing costs, and drive higher revenue. It offers a superior long-term return on investment (ROI) to any other form of marketing.
The SEO Process
There are no secrets to SEO. Success depends on possessing the widely available search engine optimization techniques, and more importantly their proper implementation. There is an established and proven search engine optimization process to achieve high search engine rankings:
1) SEO Keyword Phrase Research
• Keyword Search Volume - How often they are searched by internet users
• Keyword Competition - How many websites show up in the search engine results
You will want to target keywords and phrases that are not too broad (ie: “hotels”) and not too specific (ie: “boutique hotels in Timbuktu under $100 per night”). This provides you with the best chance at achieving healthy web traffic without spending excessive time and effort.
The best practice is to target one unique keyword phrase between two and five words for each page on your website. Each keyword phrase should be highly relevant and descriptive of the content in that page.
The process to researching the ideal keywords and phrases involves:
Brainstorming
Ask yourself what visitors would type into a search engine to find your website. Go to a search engine and perform these searches. The results that appear are your competitors.
Competitive Research
Visit your competitors’ websites and find what keywords they target in their page title, header tags, and body content. This will give you a good indication of the kinds of keywords and phrases that work.
Research Tools
There are several popular keyword research tools on the market today. These help in the keyword research process by providing you with ideas on what words to use, the level of competition for these keywords, as well as their popularity (search frequency). My personal favorite is the Google Search-Based Keyword Tool because it works well and is FREE. Two other popular tools that cost money to use but have free trials available are Keyword Discovery and WordTracker.
2) SEO Copywriting
Once you have selected your keywords and phrases, it is time to add them to your web pages. Search engines only read text. It is essential that the following areas of your website include your keywords and key phrases:
Title
The title of your webpage is the most important to search engines, and useful to website visitors to understand what your web page is about immediately. Ensure your keywords are placed here, and that the length of the title does not exceed 65 characters as the rest is not displayed by certain search engines.
Headers
The header tags (h1, h2, … h6) are also very important to search engines. The H1 tag carries the next most weight after the title tag, and should be used only once per web page. The H2 tag is also very important, and should be used to describe all the major subsections of each page. H3-H6 tags should be used to describe the remaining headers in your web page.
Body Text
The text that provides the actual content for your web page is called the body text. It is recommended to provide at least 500 words of high quality and relevant body text per web page. Your keywords must be included in a natural and unobtrusive way within this body text to help with your search engine rankings.
Meta Description
The meta description does not carry as much weight in search engine ranking algorithms, but is very important nonetheless. Certain search engines such as Google will display the meta description in the search engine results. A well written meta description will convey to the searcher what the website is about, and generate a visit from a user if it describes what they are looking for.
URL
Including your keywords in the URL can be very beneficial to your search engine rankings. Ensure that the words in the url accurately reflect the content of that page, and do not include more than two or three hyphens as these look ’spammy’ to search engines.
Image Descriptions
Since search engines cannot ’see’ images, applying a description about the image in the form of an alt tag is beneficial. Keywords placed in the alt tag will help with your search engine ranking by providing both your readers and search engines an alternative text description of what the image is about.
Bold and Italics
Bold and italicized text is given more importance than ordinary text by search engines. Within reason, enclosing relevant keywords in bold or italicized text will help your rankings.
3) Website Navigation Structure
Your website’s internal linking structure is very important to search engines and your visitors. Simple and intuitive navigation will help search engines and visitors find their way around your website. Make sure the anchor text of your links are descriptive of the pages they lead to. Including a site map on your website is very helpful in showing the search engine spiders how your site is laid out. A clean internal linking structure is a requirement for achieving high ranks in the search engines.
4) Web Standards Compliance
Ensuring your website adheres to the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will help with your search engine position. These guidelines define how web pages should be structured and created. You can check the compliance of any website by entering it into the W3C Markup Validation Service to find and resolve any compliance issues.
5) SEO Inbound Linking Strategy
Generating a large number of relevant and quality inbound links to your website is essential to ranking high on search engines. They are very important to search engines because they measure the popularity and relevance of your website to the outside world. You will want inbound links that come from websites that are similar to yours (relevance), and that are trusted by the search engines. Do not pay for inbound links, it is a risky strategy that could result in a search engine penalty on your website. Link building takes time but is one of the most important factors in your success. Writing fresh, relevant, and unique content is the best way to achieve growth and quality inbound links.
6) SEO Measurement and Optimization
Professional search engine optimization is an ongoing process that requires constant attention and effort to maintain top search engine rankings. The success of your efforts must be measured and analyzed to come up with recommendations to improve or maintain your rank. The results of these recommendations is then re-evaluated creating on ongoing optimization cycle. Web analytics provides you with the measurement capabilities you need. Two free and excellent programs I use to measure SEO results are Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. Using these together will provide you with all the insight you need to evaluate your SEO initiatives and drive improvements.
