How to Start Search Engine Optimization

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outstandingSEO was built to help you maximize your business, by increasing your revenue and showing you exactly how you can turn search engines into a perpetual source of high-quality precision targeted traffic for your website.

This is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

If you aren’t already familiar with SEO, you should start with our article: What is Search Engine Optimization? It will give you the solid foundation needed to truly benefit from all the below.

If you’re studying SEO, you probably already have a website. If not, you should start here with, How to Make a Website.

Once you understand the basics of SEO is and why they’re an essential part of your marketing strategy, it’s time to optimize your site for success.

Solid Foundations

SEO is about optimizing your website and it’s content. The foundation (software) your website is built on will determine how successfully you can do this.

There is no “perfect software” to build your website on. The goal is to find a solution that offers ease of use, customization and SEO-features.

The best combination we’ve found, by far, is WordPress with the Thesis Theme. If you already have a website don’t worry, just make sure it allows you to control the following elements:

URL Structure

The URL is the one of the important elements of any web page, both for SEO and because it’s how your visitors navigate to your pages.

In terms of SEO it is beneficial to include your targeted phrases in the URL. The most effective position is before the TLD.

Example: TargetPhrase.com

However if your website targets multiple phrases (which we highly encourage), it’s preferable to have the phrase after the TLD.

Example: BrandName.com/Target-Phrase

Your optimum URL structure should be as minimalistic as possible, like the example above. However, depending on your software and configuration you may have slightly more complex URLs.

Example: BrandName.com/content/TargetPhrase.php

This URL structure is not optimal, but including your target phrase in the URL is good enough. SEO isn’t about perfection, it’s about doing the small things that will move you as close to perfect as possible.

Title Tag

The title tag is the most important element on your web page.

When visitors come across your webpage on the SERPs, your title tag tells them exactly what to expect on that particular page.

Search engines rely heavily on the title tag to figure out which searches your web page should show for. If you want to rank on the first page for a search term, it is essential you have the search term in your title tag, ideally at the beginning.

Never place too many search terms into a single title tag. This is called “keyword stuffing” and when you do it, the search engines will quickly figure it out and penalize your website. Don’t include terms which are irrelevant to the content on your page. It’s misleading to both visitors and search engines, and will carry negative consequences.

Navigational Elements

There are many types of navigation: horizontal, vertical, footer, etc. Style isn’t important. Control is. You must be able to manage which links are displayed and how they appear.

An example of horizontal navigation

Your navigation holds some of your strongest internal links (they are shown on every page). It’s important you make the most out of these.

How do you do that?

By linking to your most valuable pages with perfect anchor text. For example, if I ran a laptop website, my navigation might include: Laptops, Netbooks, Laptop Bags, Printers and Software – all high competition search terms.

Headings

Content sandwiched in between the following tags: <H1>, <H2>, <H3>, <H4>, <H5> or <H6> are called headings and are displayed differently than regular content (usually larger or more prominent).

Example code: <H1>Example of a Heading</H1>

The two most important headings are H1 and H2. You should use them in your content whenever possible. Only use the H1 tag once per page and for the main heading only. Use H2 tags for sub-headings.

Include the search term you are targeting in your H1 tag. As you can see in the annotated example above, Amazon would like to show up in the search results when people search for “Four Seasons Kindle Edition” so that is exactly what they put in the tag.

In terms of H2s (sub-headings), you can include supplementary search terms such as “Four Seasons Reviews,” but only if they make sense. H2 headings don’t hold nearly as much weight in terms of rankings so it isn’t essential to optimize them.

Hyperlinks

Often referred to as backlinks, internal links or simply links. Hyperlinks are the currency of the web: the means in which visitors navigate from page to page. Because of their importance, they are a major factor in how search engines calculate the value of a page. This value ultimately determines how your web pages (and website as a whole) perform in the search engine results.

Example code: <a href="http://exampleURL.com" rel="nofollow">Anchor Text</a>

There are three important elements to the above link:

1. Location – Can you indentify where the above link is pointing? Hint: it’s the URL after href=”.
2. Anchor Text – The anchor text tells the visitor what they are clicking on, but it also influences which search terms the linked-to page will rank for. Anchor text is a huge ranking factor and must never be ignored.
3. Rel=”nofollow” - Links with the nofollow tag do not appear differently to visitors, but search engines don’t count these links when calculating a website’s authority.

The key to effective link building links is always putting quality over quantity. A single link from an authority site like CNN.com is worth more than thousands from low quality sites.

Structure

Having a solid site structure ensures each of your pages receives a proportional amount of link juice. If you can’t sketch your site structure, it’s probably a mess and should be worked on. The ideal SEO structure should look like a pyramid.

Here is an example of a simple pyramid, the more attributes your products have, the more layers there will be.

Although the above example is for an ecommerce site, the exact same structure can be applied to content-based websites. Instead of product attributes, you have sub-categories and tags which create additional layers. Instead of products at the bottom, you have articles or additional pieces of content.

If you can imagine all the lines in the example above are links, you can see how the link juice flows up and down with ease.

This also shows how easily visitors can navigate through your content to easily find your products and services if you have a solid structure. This reinforces the earlier point: search engines are looking for the content that makes visitors happy.

Ranking Positions

The endgame of great SEO is to gather as many quality visitors to your web pages as possible. This is done by ranking first on the SERPs for your search terms.

When you first initiate your SEO efforts, you probably won’t be ranking especially high. Depending on your level of competition, you may not even show up on the first ten pages!

Assuming your site structure is solid and all the basics are covered. What’s missing?

Authority.

If a web page is ranking above you, it means the search engines believe that web page is a better match for that search than yours. Fortunately, search engines determine ranking by using algorithms based around variables, or ranking factors, meaning no result is forever.

Improve your ranking factors and you will improve your results.

There are hundreds of ranking factors, far too many to cover in this article, or for you to remember. Fortunately few carry significant weight in the ranking algorithm.

The most important, by far, are:

Title Tag

We spoke about the importance of the title tag in the beginning so I won’t reiterate that. But I will say that although having the correct title tag is one of the most effective ways to increase your ranking, it’s also the easiest.

Page Authority

The authority of a page is calculated by counting the links pointing toward it, then calculating the sum of their link juice. This includes internal links, external links and image links.

A page with a high authority is one with a diverse range of links from high quality sources.

Domain Authority

Domain authority works the same as page authority, but instead of a value assigned to a single page, it’s attributed to the website as a whole. Internal links do not count towards domain authority.

A domain with a high authority is one with a diverse range of links from high-quality sources.

Number of Linking Domains

A single website can have thousands of web pages with your link, which is why search engines focus on the number of websites (root domains) linking to your website, rather than the number of pages.

Remember however, quality always matters over quantity. Hundreds of links from low quality domains won’t take you to the top, especially for a competitive term.

Authority of Linking Domains

Both the domain authority of the linking domain and the page authority of the actual page where the link is housed are taken into account.

Our standby example, a link from a weak page on CNN.com, carries more weight than a link from the strongest page on your mom’s blog.

Anchor Text of Inbound Links

Second only to title text, anchor text is how search engines determine which pages to display for each search term. In some situations, web pages can rank for a term even if they don’t have the term in their title, based simply on the number of incoming links.

For an example click here.

If you clicked the example you will see Adobe Reader ranking first for the term “click here.” This is because thousands of people link to Adobe Reader with the anchor text “click here” when they are telling visitors how to read PDFs.

Uniqueness of Content

If you copied your content from another website, Google will not display your site, they will place you in the supplementary index where no one will see it. This is because they aim to show ten different options for each search term, not ten results all displaying the exact same content.

Fortunately, this only happens when you are not the original publisher. When you’re the original publisher and people copy you, they’re the ones who get placed in the supplementary index.

Next Steps

If you’ve read this far, congratulations! You now have the core knowledge you need to climb the search engines.

It won’t be an easy ride, but if you want us by your side the entire journey, join our (FREE) newsletter. It’s easy. Simply enter your email address below and click, “Sign me up!”

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