SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of increasing quality traffic to a web site from search engines’ organic (natural) search results. Search engines such as Google have computerized “spiders” that index and analyze your website every couple of weeks, determining the relevant keywords of your website. Search engine optimization is not an over night process, it’s a long term and ever-changing strategy. You not only need years of experience and developed skills to implement SEO strategies, you also need to practice patience.
SEO is a long-term solution, and unlike pay per click (see Pay-Per-Click VS. SEO), your search engine listing can be clicked all day with no incurred click cost. Case studies have proven that organic listings tend to receive more clicks than the sponsored ads.
Elements of Successful SEO
Here are just a few of the things that go into making your SEO campaign a success:
- Keyword Research – researching and determining the relevant keywords people are searching.
- HTML Optimization - Most websites are developed using HTML code, and successfully optimized sites start with optimized HTML. Optimized HTML takes longer and requires advanced knowledge to program compared with a non-optimized website.
- Optimized Title Tags - Title tags are the words that appear as the clickable link on the search engines, these need to include appropriate keywords.
- Optimized Meta Tags – The information that describes what your website is about – it is inserted in the beginning section of the site code.
- SEO Friendly Coding – Ensuring that the method your site is programmed does not hinder search engines reading your website.
- Ongoing content creation – A properly optimized website starts with quality content that includes relevant keywords, and is updated on a consistent basis.
- Link Building - Your site should receives links on older and highly reputable websites.
- Local Online Optimization - This is including your local area on your site and making sure your business location is registered with search engines and directories.
- Off-site optimization - Embedding video on video sites and having a social media presence as well as many more off-site tactics will improve your search engine rankings.
- Blogging (see the Power of an Optimized Blog)
- the list goes on…
Why does SEO take time?
There is no way that all of the tactics listed above and the ones not listed can be executed appropriately if it is done quickly. Even if some of these methods are completed quickly you still have to wait for the search engines to crawl and re-crawl your site and position it for a given search result. Search engines typically crawl a website every couple weeks to a month. The more incoming links you have the process will speed up a bit but they have to be quality links from relative sites.
Your focus should be building your content, optimizing that content correctly to show Google, Bing and others that your site is worth better placement for a variety of your targeted keywords. You have probably heard “content is king” for search engines, and when you optimize original quality content you will start seeing a rise in targeted traffic….. search engines are smarter than you think!
NEXT – SEO Takes Time Part II: Earning and converting web traffic, incremental growth is good growth, and how to pick the right Internet marketing company.
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