Website Marketing & SEO Essentials

The Essence of SEO: Keywords, Content and Links
by Nicolette Beard

Every day I strive to articulate to business owners basic principles and practices of Website Marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). I derive great pleasure in educating my clients and prospects so that they can develop a firm grasp on this fascinating and frustrating communications tool called the Internet. If it's not rocket science, then what is it? Here's my simplified formula:

Keywords + Unique Page Titles + Focused Content + Links = High Rankings (SEO)

As the saying goes, SEO is easy but not simple. Let's break down the components.

Web Marketing Basics - 4 SEO Tactics

1.  Keyword Research. If anyone is still guessing at the keywords their visitors use, they are not practicing SEO. Even the best paid subscription services like WordTracker and Keyword Discovery only measure a fraction of actual searches over time. I've read estimates that from 33-50% of all search is unique on any given day. This represents a huge opportunity to not only create a market niche, but also to drive market share.

Your salespeople, customers and current visitors are your best source for market research. We are often too close to our business to view it objectively. Salespeople know and understand problems because their job is to solve them.

This is the mindset of his customer when he is searching. How can I solve this problem? And they often use search terms completely different from the language your engineers or Webmaster dreamed up when they designed the site.

Your visitor statistics provide another gauge for how people view your products and services. If you are not checking your server log files, you are not practicing SEO. If you are hosted on a server that does not provide basic Web stats, change your hosting company. Without a benchmark, you cannot develop a workable strategy for improvement.

2.  Page Titles. The single greatest factor in ranking on the search engines for your keyword is having a unique Page Title for every page. Many sites, especially those using Content Management Systems (CMS) use the company name as the default. If you cannot change your title tags, you are not practicing SEO.

3.  Content. A Web site without content will fail. A Web site without focused content will flounder. The purpose any search engine serves is to provide relevant results for your query. This is why Google is the king of search representing 64% of all queries. They never wavered from their mission. With the introduction of Universal Search, they will continue to dominate the search landscape. Although with the launch of Bing, this could change.

Without relevant, focused, specialized content, the search engines won't crawl or index your pages. It's that simple. You don't stand a chance at ranking for competitive queries. It's like expecting to be a successful retailer with outdated product on the shelves.

4.  Links. Internal linking can accomplish some of the goals of SEO, if you've done the keyword homework. But attracting incoming links from quality sites is the Holy Grail of staying on top of the search engine results page (SERPs).

Some search engines favor quantity of links while others (Google) reward quality or trusted links. They operate on the theory that if a number of sites link to Site A and Site A links to Site B, Site B benefits from this recommendation. But the sites linking to Site A had also better be trusted sites or you may end up linking to a "bad neighborhood" and your link value will be zero.

It all boils down to content. Informative, interesting, quality content will trump hundred's of random, incoming links any day. Why? Because profitable, professional Web sites are always looking for great resources to share with their visitors. When your content is viewed as a resource, others will link to it naturally with a variety of search terms in the hyperlink.

When a Web site develops its own unique link signature through quality content, the cream always rises to the top.