Welcome to the first step in learning search engine optimization (SEO) for yourself.
If you are reading this article then you are likely to be someone who:
- Already has a website
- Has the time to invest in optimizing your website
- Isn’t earning enough to afford professional seo….yet!
Ok so, my name is Andy Hughes and I’ve been doing SEO in one fashion or another for around 5 years, which by my reckoning and the speed at which things change, makes me a veteran. That make’s me feel old and I’m not, well not that old anyway! Still, I have spent a lot of time and invested a lot of sweat, tears, mistakes and more tears to learn what I know about Search Engine Optimization SEO and I’m still learning.
I have been building and running websites since 1995 when I bought my first modern home pc and got hooked on surfing and messing about with web design programmes. Back then it was very basic and Microsoft was really good. Nowadays I would urge everyone to avoid MS Frontpage! In my early days I was mostly just interested in putting something on the internet and I didn’t really care whether it appeared in a search engine. Basically because there weren’t really any search engines back then like we have today.
Over the years programmes became more sophisticated and intuitive and I continued to develop my knowledge but largely as a hobbyist. It wasn’t until I set up my own business consultancy, and needed a website that performed, did I really start to pay attention to search engines and rankings and traffic. So I built my company website, started to use keywords in the right places, put lots of content on the site and submitted it to search engines. Sure enough I was soon starting to see my site rising up through the rankings.
There are lots of people who would tell you that everything has changed with search engines in the last few years and SEO is now a trade in itself. This is a half truth, yes search engines have become more sophisticated and yes there are lots of SEO companies now in existence. The fundamentals of optimizing a website though hasn’t changed hugely. It’s the competitiveness that has changed drastically. More companies and individuals are now paying attention to SEO and investing time and money on it. Therefore, what was once relatively easy to get a ranking for is now taking a lot more effort and perseverance.
The last and probably most interesting thing to note about search engine optimization is that there is no formal qualification as such for it. Sure there are people offering certificates for demonstrating your knowledge, but unless they are offered by the best in the industry, many of them are not worth the paper they are written on (if you get a written copy!). The good thing about this lack of qualification is that it means you don’t have to train to be good enough, you can just do it for yourself, hence the reason your’re reading this.
And so to begin.
How Important Is SEO?
Well, imagine you are a retailer sat at home in your front room with boxes of christmas socks piled all around you. You busy away counting your stock, checking the packaging and eyeing over your brochures. Every so often you look over at the phone………..but nothing. No calls, no bring bringing, no messages, no nothing. The phone is silent. Why? Because nobody knows you exist! Your potential customers can’t see you sat there, can’t see your boxes of fine products and to all intents and purposes you might just as well not exist. You’ve spent money on stocks and brochures with nothing to show for it. Now some may just give up, in fact many probably have. I know I’ve spoken to a few who weren’t far off.
This little example illustrates exactly why Search Engine Optimization is so important (no apologies for the US spelling of Optimization by the way, I’ll explain in a later article) and why you can’t afford not to do it, even if you are poor and broke like I’ve been!
You see, the search engine is your potential high street. Page One Of Google is the main street with all the really big names on it and the big spenders. Page two is a little side street with some interesting shops, who’d love to be on the main street but can’t afford it. Page three is a little back street farther from the centre of town which has some interesting shops that you can’t quite remember. Once you get past page three you might as well sit in your front room and try to sell your wares from there because you’ve got as good a chance at that point!
If you’re going to sell online and you want to be successful you’ve got to grasp SEO by the scruff of the neck and make it work for you. There is no two ways about it!
Consider this:
- Google dominates the search engine market with around 80% of daily searches.
- Most people won’t look past page two.
- A large proportion of people don’t look past page one.
- Around 70% of customers will buy from one of the top 5 websites on page one.
- Your website traffic will rise exponentially when you make the shift from page two to page one.
- Being on page one doesn’t guarantee sales, great content, great products and a strong sales message do.
So, what is SEO and What is it not?
Well let’s start with what it’s not and get that out of the way.
- It’s not a quick fix.
- It’s not going to go away.
- It’s not about stuffing your keywords into your page over and over and over again.
- It’s not some secret art or magic that is only beholden to a special few gurus.
- It’s not just a case of paying for a thousand links and hoping.
There are many companies out there offering to optimize your site and who aren’t very good at it. However, as your knowledge may be limited, they successfully manage to dupe many people into thinking they can change your fortunes. The reality is, often they take your money, tinker about and fail to show much in return.
I learnt a valuable lesson a long time ago. Remember I told you I built my own company website when I first set up my company? Well, a couple of years in I decided it needed a face lift but I didn’t have the time and so I employed the services of a guy to do it for me. His proposal was good, he created some good design templates for me to get a feel for his ability. I was sold and so I signed and off he went. The website I got back was great looking and I was much happier with the overall look and feel of the site. That was until it got uploaded!
Over a matter of a week I could see the traffic had dropped dramatically. I looked for it in the search rankings, nowhere! What was going on? I started looking behind the design into the code and found that there were major flaws in all sorts of areas. No keywords; no meta descriptions; all the page titles were the same; all of the image alt tags had “nav” written in them (don’t worry if some of what I’m saying doesn’t mean anything, it’ll become clear later!). I did a little test and typed in the keyword I wanted to be ranked for and followed it with “nav” and sure enough I popped up at number one! (image alt tags are important, but we’ll talk more about that in later sessions).
This web designer had made a monumental error. He’d approached my website from a design perspective and not from a business perspective. He’d applied minimal optimization. He’d missed all sorts of best practice standards that should be factored into any web design. And he was qualified. And he had a healthy client list. Frightening! Even I got tricked, how dumb do I feel!
So clearly SEO is not to be taken lightly if you depend on the internet for your income.
What is SEO then?
- It’s about creating easy to read, relevant site content.
- It’s about creating just enough content to allow you to say what you need using your keyphrases or keywords.
- It’s about making a well structured site with good layout.
- It’s about presenting a solid theme for your site that is “on topic” and relevant.
- It’s about giving other websites reasons to want to be linked to you.
- It’s about regularly updating content on your site to keep it fresh and appealing.
- It’s about helping the search engines to see and index your site as easily as possible.
I will introduce you to a couple of terms known as “black hat” and “white hat” SEO. These terms represent the dark side and the good side of SEO. Stay away from anything which is Black Hat tactics, it’ll get you banned! White Hat is the good, honest, reliable method incorporating all of the list above but in an ethical way. You can read more on the internet about Black Hat methods if you choose, however, if you stick to what we cover in these sessions you won’t go far wrong.
It’s a simple case of walking on the right side of the fence. If you hop over to the dark side, expect Google to ban you or at least send you hurtling down the rankings for a good while.
Professional SEO or DIY?
A good question, should I pay for a professional or do it myself? Well, my honest answer will always be to pay for a professional (one you’ve checked out properly) because they are experts and spend all day, every day doing SEO. However, as is often the case, client’s can’t afford the kind of outlay needed to invest in this kind of support. They are forced to either ignore it or do it themselves.
If you’re not really a techy and don’t understand website design and search engines then this can feel like quite a daunting prospect. But it’s like anything, with a little knowledge and some practice you begin to understand and it becomes easier. Professional SEO companies will have all manor of software, systems and processes designed to make SEO quicker, better managed and more reliable but that’s because they are working for a number of client’s and need to create efficiency. Doing DIY SEO, it’s a case of how much time and how well you organize yourself. As an immediate starting point you can look up most search engine optimisation companies and get an SEO Report done on your website. Many of them provide a basic free report which will highlight where you’re website is not as well optimised as it should be. These are useful as a starting platform in beginning your optimzation.
This series of articles will be about helping you to plan, do and review your SEO efforts in the right way to give the best chance of succeeding.
In the next session we will get into looking at arguably the most important element of SEO, “Keywords”. I will help you identify lists of keywords and work out which ones are the right one’s to use for your site. This session will include:
- How to identify lots of keywords
- How to rank your keywords
- How to choose the most effective ones
- How to check your rank for your keywords
- Tools for keyword identification
That’s all for this session.
Enjoy the next one
Andy Hughes
PS. We are now offering SEO Coaching, which is designed as a mix of telephone and web conference sessions with me where you’ll learn practically how to apply SEO principles.
