What is SEO ?

Recently, during my search for additional keywords and phrases for new optimized content on my own website I noticed, while using Google Insights for Search, that the phrase “What is SEO” is defined as one of the “rising searches”.

This was wonderful news for me as:

1. It means that more people are becoming aware of SEO and trying to find out what it is
2. It means that when someone asks me what I do there is more of a chance that they will have an idea than they did in the past when I often encountered blank or bewildered faces and had to try and explain what is SEO
3. It means that hopefully more people will realize that this is a science, is extremely time-consuming, and that probably an experienced SEO consultant should be involved, at least at the beginning of the project, which means more work for SEO consultants like myself

So, what is SEO?

This is the way it is described in Wikipedia: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

OK, so now you probably want to know what are “natural” and “organic” search results. When you run a search on Google you probably noticed that often the search results are split into two columns.

The right column consists of purely ads. These ads are paid for by the advertiser each time they are clicked. The left column is all the “natural” or “organic” results, however, sometimes above these organic results there could be another few paid advertisements. In order to distinguish these paid ads from the organic results you will notice that they have a different background color and also the word “Sponsored” appears next to these ads.

Two Organic Myths:

Myth 1. Google can be paid in order to raise your organic or natural rankings
No matter what anyone tells you there is absolutely no truth to this myth. These results are based on Google’s algorithms and rely on your web pages giving Google the information it is looking for regarding the search being run.

Myth 2. If you have a Pay-Per-Click (Adwords) account then Google will rank your site higher in the organic results
Once again, this is totally untrue. Adwords and organic results have absolutely nothing to do with one another.

So, if you are still reading this I assume that now you know what is SEO your next question will be, “how do I get my website into the organic or natural results”.

Well firstly you need to decide for which terms you would like your website to appear. You can refer to my blog post: “The Best Keyword Research Tools”. Once you have a list of potential keywords you need to check out how competitive each term is. One way to do this is to enter the term into Google and see how many results it pulls up. You can also check how many web pages have these terms in their title and anchor which means that they are already optimized.

In order to estimate the traffic you can use this nice tool which saves having to write the code into Google each time: Google Traffic Estimator. If the competition is huge then you should try and find alternative keywords. If it doesn’t seem too bad you need to do the following:

Check if this term is really being used enough to make the effort of optimization worthwhile. There are various tools you can use for this, but you can try this one that is based on Wordtracker results: Keyword Checker

You then need to use this term in the following parts of one of your web pages:

Title tag – This is the information that appears right at the top of your browser for each web page you search on.
Meta Description – This is usually the information that appears under your search results in the search engines, though this is not a guarantee
Meta Keywords – Most people aren’t sure if this is really necessary as the search engines don’t seem to take the Meta Keywords into consideration very much anymore and by adding them you are giving your competition very easy access to the keywords you are trying to optimize
Heading – This is the actually heading above your content, and this should really be within special heading tags, for example < h1 >my heading< /h1 >
Page Content – This is critical. There is really no point in doing all the above and then not using the term in the actual page content
Internal links – Try and link phrases within your page content to other relevant pages within your website
Incoming links – Look for other sites where you can submit your pages so that they will link to your website

I hope that I have cleared up the question what is SEO, and of course you are welcome to comment or ask any further questions.

Debbie