DIY SEO Week 1: Your Rank Will Rise! SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – even the term seems formidable, beyond anyone’s knowledge except an SEO expert. We happen to be SEO experts, and the first thing we’ll tell you is that anyone can use SEO optimization on their own content. Can, and should – if they’d like their rankings to rise. Rankings? What could that possibly mean? It boils down to you. How you search, what words you type in for your search, and more. This blog begins a series of five: each one carries you into a deeper knowledge and understanding of SEO optimization so that you, yourself can not only optimize your own content but check your standings and learn from that how to better work with your SEO. This is not a one time process, realize that. You must complete this process every time you add content to your site. You should check rankings after any change to see if it worked or not. Now, we begin. SEO optimizing your content falls into three simple categories.
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DIY SEO Week 1: Your Rank Will Rise! Fresh content We all have sites we hit every day. Why do you visit your favorites? Because something is always new there, right? Who wants to visit a ‘static’ page (one where the content never changes?) Search engines are very aware of this: they check how often a site is updated. That’s a major factor in ranking: fresh content.
Content that people want to read Easy, you think. I’ll just find other articles, boil them down, and present them. Step out of site owner’s shoes and into user’s shoes. Now. You really want to hit a site that has stale content? Fresh to that site: stale to you because you already read that item a few days ago. Back button. Funny enough, using that back button rapidly has its very own term: bounce rate. A user hits a site, takes one look, hits the back button: ‘bounces’ right back where they came from. That’s one statistic you need to keep an eye on: your bounce rate.
Content that’s easily found Now you have fresh, original content. That’s great: but how are people going to find you? SEO, baby. SEO. Content that’s fresh and original is 2/3 of the equation: the final third is equally important. Optimizing the page’s contents that you want people to see, whether it’s your ‘launch’ (home) page or any other page (forums, your site’s blog, your store, whatever it may be.) How do people find sites? Well, how do you do it? Google, Yahoo, Bing – whatever your search engine flavor happens to be. This next part is interactive: you are going to prove this point yourself.
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DIY SEO Week 1: Your Rank Will Rise! What do search engines have to do with my traffic? Here’s a small example. You’ve been given a Siamese kitten for your birthday, and you want to know more, learn about the breed, meet people who have them. Type “Siamese cat community” into Google, and… 1,160,000 results are found. You (and almost everybody else) do the same thing: you hit the first result shown that is closest to what you need. It happens to be Siamese Cats and Kittens | An Owner’s Guide To This Beautiful Breed, and it says “…community of Siamese cats” in the description. Click – and no bounce rate because it’s exactly what you wanted. Shortly you’re uploading pictures, reading stories – over coming days, you realize a world-wide group of Siamese lovers hangs out and posts there (fresh, original content.) It interests you (and a whole lot of other people.) Our point: how did you find it? It was the first entry on Google: easy to find. Most people will hit that first page of results: no satisfaction, they’ll type in another ‘search term,’ or in SEO lingo, ‘keyword.’ If your site isn’t highly ranked (appearing on 1st, 2nd and rarely, 3rd page of search results) then nobody is going to find you no matter if Shakespeare rose from the dead and wrote a new play on your site, and nobody but English teachers are searching!
That keyword business, how does it affect ranking? Now you know what a keyword is: a word or term a user types into a search engine, looking for a site with certain content pertaining to that term. Galaxy | WEBLINKS LTD Call at: 888.666.4316 http://www.galaxyweblinks.com/
DIY SEO Week 1: Your Rank Will Rise! Put yourself in Google’s shoes, now. Up against Yahoo, Bing, so many more – how do you keep ahead? By presenting the most relevant results for any keyword entered, of course. How do you feed these search engines their preferred diet of relevant results for a keyword? A search engine has some pretty wicked math working, but at the same time it’s stupidly simple. It takes the keyword/term and checks a couple of quick places: the site’s title, the description – and… and…. The content. Back to our Siamese cat community – at the one quick glance we gave that business, that term was used in the description and at least once on the launch page. If it was that simple, be kind of easy to cheat, eh? Just put a blank page with ‘Siamese cat community’ and you’re gold. (People used to do just that.) Now, however, bounce rate is checked! How do you yourself check this bounce rate? Either wait a week, or take this hint: Google can help you. Be the first to figure out how and post a comment! If someone took one look and bailed, God only knows what that page was about: certainly not cats. One last time: fresh, original, relevant content: if not on your launch page, then a blog for your site, forums… or a news page that you update frequently. But where do those keywords belong? Just anywhere on my page? Sure, for now. Anywhere will do. Just realize that search engines give certain locations a much higher priority than others… if it was counted in points, a keyword here is worth 10 points more than one just slapped into a paragraph. For that matter, a
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DIY SEO Week 1: Your Rank Will Rise! keyword in the correct paragraph is worth 5 points more than one in any other paragraph. You actually have homework: this series lasts one month. You’ll need what you’re doing now for the blog 2 weeks away. If you don’t have a Google email account, get one please. Login to your Google account, and get your site into Google Analytics and Google AdSense (free, but you must have a Google account to tie them into.) Then, go to this site, type in your most popular keyword and your site: it will give you your exact Google ranking. Write that down – you’ll need it! That’s enough for you to chew on for one week. Next week, we’re getting a bit more technical on you: you’ll learn exactly where keywords need to be to garner the most points possible, along with the proper number of keywords per page: facts that will make your ranking rise like a rocket! If all this makes interesting reading but is far too time-intensive for you, there is a much simpler way to get your site SEO-Optimized. It involves more, a lot more, than we’ve discussed in these simple steps: server tweaking, placing back-links for your industry and more. We build sites from the ground-up optimized, or we take sites like yours and redesign them for the highest-possible ranking. We’ve done it often: here is our portfolio of sites we’ve optimized from the ground-up. (Sooner or later, we’ll add all the sites we’ve optimized!) Call us at 888.666.4316 and we’ll be happy to discuss your site’s needs.
Galaxy | WEBLINKS LTD Call at: 888.666.4316 http://www.galaxyweblinks.com/