Using SEO to Improve Your Search Rankings
About The Author
XO Digital Marketing aims to help main street businesses marketing themselves in the digital age. Building a local online presence is not impossible & can be more affordable than traditional marketing. It is far more interactive and allows the people and personality of your business to shine through. We provide a full range of marketing solutions to help bridge the technology & marketing gap for entrepreneurs to focus on their people and products. Need help attracting new local clients? Need help getting repeat business? We can help on both fronts. We hope you find our ebooks helpful in teaching and training you on various aspects of digital marketing that you can employ today to increase your bottom line. We provide both baseline and advanced techniques to help no matter what level you are currently operating at.
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Using SEO to Improve Your Search Rankings
Before we can talk about your websites SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and what you can do to help get found on Google, we need to understand the basic parts of how a website is found. The thing you have to understand is that if you want to play the Google game you have to be part of a constantly changing machine. The way things worked last week isn't going to be the same as it is this week. If we were to break SEO into four parts (for the moment) I would break it into •
Initial on-site SEO
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Continuing SEO,
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Off-site SEO,
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And indirect optimization (Social Media)
On-site optimization. Initial on-site optimization today is really just a badge to say you know how to properly construct a website properly. That doesn’t mean everyone has a site build with the best practices in mind, by this is simply an expectation for all new websites. Your website may have many pages that should be optimized for content and services that you offer in your area. Google has recently made some changes and how they view ranking of a website. The initial on-site optimization is kind of like bragging about you. It says clearly that I'm an authority on a particular subject and communicates that I'm really good at what I do. Back in the early days all you have to do is create a website with a few pages of content and you were golden. With a bit of SEO work, you had almost as much chance as a large brand of being found online. Well this is no longer the case. Google has evolved and what we need to be doing is evolving as well so that brings the store next point which is.. Continuing On-site SEO Continuing on site SEO, at one time would've been known as /or is still known as a blog. However due to its own evolution it is now being called content marketing. Content marketing is simply taking written text, audio, and/or video and embedding it onto your website in order to convey a problem, a solution, or a message that you want to convey to the potential reader that you're trying to attract.
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Using SEO to Improve Your Search Rankings
We could continue to talk about the importance of how and why on-site optimization is important, however we need to just simply understand that it is important and what we should do about it. You need to be unique! Google rewards original and unique content that helps its algorithm find a solution to their problems. There are a number of issues that can come up. When someone comes to Google to type in a query for lawn care they could be looking for one of two things. They could be looking for products related to lawn care or someone to hire and cut their lawn, two very different issues. It's important to Google that they provide relevant answers to each unique problem. W e face a current problem with something known as content saturation. What this means is there is an overabundance of content inside of Google competing for the same problem. Every industry has people competing for the same thing. So what do I need to do to be found? The typical style of writing a blog to be found in Google is to go after homeruns. Unfortunately as I said before the homeruns are far and few between, what we need to do is going after base hits. You will need to write consistently and often and work to target your clients as best you can. This process can take anywhere from 6 month to a year to be optimized for a number of keywords your business offers. This will continue to be an ongoing process. There is a direct correlation with frequency of writing and traffic. So if you can write 5 posts a week then great, we are going to advise you to create at least 1 a week. By targeting smaller questions that are being asked inside of Google and having a large number of them over time will begin to bring you streams of traffic that will eventually snowball into one big stream. Over time if you target small keywords that generate 50 to 100 visits per month and you have 100 to 150 of those coming in every month that could represent anywhere from 5000 to 10,000 people coming in per month. Each article needs to be highly targeted and answer a question that a searcher might be asking. When writing a blog post or creating a video as a blog, you will want to title it in such a way that answers the question of the person might be looking for. For example, a decent way to title a blog post would be "How much is lawn care service?" Page 4
Using SEO to Improve Your Search Rankings
A better way to title it would be "How much is lawn care service in San Diego California?" And the best way might be to title it "How much is lawn care in California for a standard lot? “ As you can see there are obviously going to be less people asking this question overall, however it is much easier to target. Do enough of these and you have a huge stream of targeted traffic. How do I know what to write? There are an abundance of tools that you can use, some of them are free and some of them are paid. I would like to simply start you out by going to Google itself. Simply go to http://adwords.google.com or http://www.google.com/trends/, login with your Gmail account if you have one, and enter basic keywords, into the keyword tool. Google will give you an estimation of traffic and competition. I recommend starting with a basic phrase, and Google will give you alternative phrases that you can turn into a question. These tools will allow you to sort out the popularity of a given phrase by low medium and high traffic. An alternative to this is to simply write the article based on frequently asked questions inside of your own office. Chances are if you have questions that are being asked of you on a daily basis, there are many more people searching for this. Take a piece of paper or a whiteboard, and write down 50 questions that are frequently asked to you and your staff. Have your team write them down and use this as a template for your blog articles. From this, if you have the time to optimize using a tool like Google Adwords or a paid one like http://semrush.com then certainly go ahead and do so. Off-site SEO. Off-site SEO is the process of going to other high page ranking websites and low page ranking websites and offering some sort of direct benefit to that website in exchange for a back link. What is a backlink? A backlink is simply a link from another website that points back to yours. There are two basic different types of back links that you can have.
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Using SEO to Improve Your Search Rankings
1. The first is a direct link that the reader sees and knows is a direct link, it simply displays your website URL.
2. The second one is called an anchor text link. An anchor text link is a link that hyperlinks a regular word in the midst of a body of content back to the website. Here is an example of one created using a popular social bookmark platform called discuss, notice the words Benefits of SEO, it is a hyper link that goes to our page.
Why do I need backlinks? Back links are important for a couple of reasons. For one, the link will simply take readers back to your website so they can find out more about you. Secondly Google acknowledges this as a form of authority, from another website besides your own. The more credible a website (in Google's opinion) that the link comes from the better your website will do in its rankings. How do I get backlinks? Generally, and to not make this too complicated simply get back links anywhere you can, with an eye toward the best quality sources you can. Back links can come from YouTube, they can come from the directories, and they can come from just about anywhere. There are different types of back links and there are different qualities of back links so I want to just focus on one for now. Content Marketing Content marketing is simply taking the content that you already have, and reframing it to be completely different but yet say the same thing, then taking the content and posting it on another site. There are many sites called web 2.0 sites that you can create articles, post them and backlink them yourself. This is the most direct and calculated way to get backlinks. Here is a list of Web 2.0 sites that you can use, but there are many more.
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Using SEO to Improve Your Search Rankings
http://Squidoo.com http://hubpages.com http://ezinearticles.com http://infobarrel.com Guest Posting The second way to get back links, and it's a little more of an art than a calculation, is called guest posting. Guest posting is going to another website with a well-established readership, and writing an article for the author that helps their audience. This is a good place to attract new readers, display your authority, and get a back link at the same time. I suggest that if you don't already read a blog or a series of blogs every week, that you pick one or two and start reading them and start to look around for guest posts that people have done for the author of that blog. You must check each blog to see if they accept guest posting and each one of them will have their own rules. However it is a great and effective tool for getting high quality back links. Make sure that your article for the guest poster is unique and not used on your blog already. You should find it fairly easy to recycle some of your content though into a new guest post, so you don't have to start from scratch. I recommend that you start this process after you've established your list of 50 and your blog. Indirect SEO Indirect SEO is honestly a simple phrase used to capture the whole idea that social media, and other non blogging platforms are part of Google's algorithm when deciding who to put ahead of other websites in SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) that have like minded content. Not only could this be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, or literally hundreds of other social media sites, but it could also include directory reviews, podcasts coming from iTunes, or a self published book on Amazon.
Noone is exactly sure to what extent social media plays in SEO, and it's still a relatively new part of Google's algorithm. But we do know that it’s influence is growing. Since there are so many ideas that could be listed here, that I wanted to list just some basic ideas to help you get started and benefit right away. Page 7
Using SEO to Improve Your Search Rankings
Conclusion Digital Marketing encompasses many different but related tasks that are necessary to for success of your business. A great many business owners have not yet taken these strategies seriously and have not achieved optimal results in there market. If you are a small business trying to build a brand in today’s world, the time is now to begin this journey to build your online presence to reach your consumers. Some of these items in this e-book you may be able to tackle some of these on your own, others you may want to hire others to do for you. Visit our website at www.xodigitalmarketing.com to see if there are ways in which we can help you get started.
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