In an earlier post, I talked about what the heart of your business should be and the importance of one.
Now I want to discuss some simple steps you need to take to get ranked in the search engines. So you can get loads of free, laser targeted traffic to your blog. (Remember google doesn’t LOVE your company website, these strategies can also apply to your company website. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
This is the process of raising your website or heart up the google ladder for specific keywords.
Here is an easy example, Joe is on the internet, and he is looking to buy a new car. So he gets on google, does a search for a car dealers. Well you just happen to be a car dealer and you made your website very attractive to google. So Google said, Hey, I like this website let’s put it at the top of the search results. Note: This is a nature search conducted by google. Not a pay pre click ad.
Then Joe see’s your website is on top of the food chain. So he clicks on it. Joe checks out your website or blog likes what he see and then becomes a customer. Thank You google for free advertising.
Now you’re convinced, you need to know this SEO stuff.
Let’s break SEO down to 4 key elements:
- The Crawl
2. Page factors
3. Site navigation set up
4. Inbound Linking - The Crawl
Hey, you don’t want to be invisible, so someone needs to know you exist. That’s where search engine spiders come in, we will call them bots. Search engine’s send out bots to “crawl” through your website.
Basically checking you out, inside and out, everything and anything they can get there grabby little hands on (text, images, links) they look at it. Hey, they gottta know what kind of content you have.
You want the bots to “crawl” around your site. If the bots didn’t do their job, you could forget about the search engines having a clue about your website & pages. And you could say sayonara to the Search engines indexing you and Ranking you according to your content.
- Page Factors
The 3 most important on – page factors are Page Title, Headlines, and Body Text.
1) Page Title
The page title is found in the topmost sector of your web browser (the blue/black strip at the top of your web browser, with the logo of your web browser on the extreme left).
2) Headlines
Headlines are the names of your posts or articles
3) Body Text
Your body text is your actually post/article or content that helps the search engine or the website visitor know what the heck your website is about.
- Site Navigation Set Up
Don’t ignore this aspect of SEO it is just as important as all the other steps.
If web visitors can’t quickly find the information they’re looking for, they will leave as fast as they came, and most likely won’t come back.
The search engine bots also need to be able easily and quickly find what they are looking for so they can do a better job of indexing your site.
You need to make your site as navigable as possible.
Follow these 3 rules as a guideline:
1) The more important the content, the closer to home it needs to be.
Follow the (3 Click Rule) by trying to keep your Key (stuff you always want people see) Content within 3 clicks from your homepage.
Note: this is only a guideline to follow, it’s not mandatory, but it’s good one especially if you’re a beginner.
2) Use Common Sense to Group Content.
Put content where it belongs. You wouldn’t want to put your shoes in your refrigerator. So don’t do it with your website. Always try to group your content logically to allow users and search engine spiders to sort through your content effectively.
3) Don’t create a dead Zone.
Create link backs, where you link pages together. Always link back to pages or post that were created before other post or pages. Don’t forget to link back to the homepage. Plus you get more play out of the content.
- Inbound Linking
Inbound Linking is when another website backlinks (points back) to your website.
Believe it or not the more websites linking to your website the more search engines love you and the higher you rank in google, yahoo etc.
Why is SEO important? Because it’s free advertising for you and your business. Allowing you to generate free laser targeted leads for your business.