I Just Called to Say, I Love SEO

Isn’t she lovely? Isn’t she wonderful? No, I’m not talking about your website, I’m currently in awe of this phenomenal tribute to Stevie Wonder on CBS. However, as the commercials keep rolling on, and let me catch my breath, I can’t help but wonder how many viewers are actually taking notice to businesses and their hashtags, and will go to their website at any point during the night. I wonder how effective integrated marketing communications is during large programs when they aren’t themed to be entertaining such as during the Super Bowl (with this year being a disappointing and depressing exception). Because business isn’t black and white (or in tonight’s case, ebony and ivory) anymore. Marketing and sales have evolved and we must engage our customers on a new level. But how? Is there something that creates a link between two things without natural process in business? Is there a real superstition in business? Yes. It’s called SEO. And it’s just what you need, my cherie.

Search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo!) are the primary navigators for people browsing the web. So essentially, if these engines can’t find your site, no one is dropping in for a visit anytime soon. The Beginners Guide to SEO by Moz is a fantastic piece of writing to give you the quickie on this topic to better improve your business.

Search Engines do two things: 1) crawl; and 2) build an index.

Links allow “crawlers” to search the web to find relevant pages, and store data to be saved for later searches.  Like tabbing your textbook with sticky notes to find that specific section later, immediately. The top two ranking genres for searches are relevance and popularity. Ever wonder why Google offers certain things when you’re typing half way into the search? Millions of others were probably searching the same thing.

To rank better, Google suggests:

• Make pages primarily for users
• Make a site with clear hierarchy and text links
• Create a useful, information-rich site and pages that CLEARLY describe your content
• Use keywords to create descriptive, human-friendly URLS

Most people use search engines just like you probably did in High School, bullshitting your way through that History paper your procrastinated on until the night before. 1) Need an answer, 2) Formulate the need in a string of words (the query), 3) enter the query into the SE, 4) browse the front page fro a result, 5) click a result, 6) scan for a solution, 7) if unsatisfied, return to browse page, 8) enter a new query with refinements to resolve the problem

Does that sound familiar?

There’s a joke that goes “there is nothing beyond the first page of results on Google”. That’s half true, Because even though Google may say YOU HAVE 2.4 MILLION RESULTS, really, you see less than 10 because you somehow believe if the answer isn’t right in front of you, you must have entered the query incorrectly.

Hey, that’s not a bad thing. But it’s a bad thing for your business if it isn’t popular and making that front page. Slingshot SEO found that  #1 position in Google search results receives 18.2% of all click-through traffic, with #2 pulling in 10.1%, #3 at 7.2% and under 2% for beyond the #5 position. Not looking so hot at that rate.

So how do you avoid the potholes to this search failure?

• Websites using content management systems create copies of original content, so it becomes difficult to find the authentic page
• errors in a website’s crawling directives may lead to blocking SEs entirely
• Poor link structure may be disregarded by SEs
• Uncommon terms (“small fruit technology box” is not the same as Apple iPad mini)

In others words: create unique, effective content to be seen. What’s that look like? Well, maybe you should check out my other blog about that.

Keywords are fundamental to the search process. “… the entire science of information retrieval (including web-based search engines like Google) is based on keywords. As the engines crawl and index the contents of pages around the web, they keep track of those pages in keyword-based indexes rather than storing 25 billion web pages all in one database.”

As you make your keywords more specific, you narrow the competition for search results, and improve your changes of achieving a higher ranking.

URL construction is equally important. A few guidelines to making effective URLs:

• Think from the perspective of a user; If you can easily and accurately predict the content you’d expect to find on the page, your URL is appropriately descriptive.
• SHORTER IS BETTER
• Keywords; be selective in how many you use (too many ingredients spoils the cake)
• Go static (The best URLs are human-readable and without lots of parameters, numbers, and symbols)

“Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. Ranking for the right keywords can make or break your website, it’s not always about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of visitors.”

You need to uniquely define yourself through notable traits. How would you talk about yourself? You wouldn’t give a memoir every time someone asked you that question. You would use key characteristics. Same concept works for your website. If the search engine in the bartender, and you go in and say “have you seen my friend? she looks like _____, ____, and has _____” and the bartender can reflect on his memory of stored data to point her out. it’s essential to not only understand the demand for a given term or phrase, but also the work required to achieve high rankings in search engine results. This is key to beating out big brand names in that search result page.

Essentially, most popular sites have several of these distinguishable traits

• Are easy to use, navigate, and understand
• Provide direct, actionable information relevant to query
• Clean aesthetics and are accessible to modern browsers
• High quality, legitimate, credible content
  • strong engagement metrics, machine learning, link patterns from search algorithms

But probably the most important thing you should know when crafting your website for website search-ability, is to have effective link building. And what a surprise, Moz has a copy for that too. The need to understand and implement high-quality campaigns is essential if you’re going to compete and thrive online, and that isn’t going to change any time soon.

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. Search engines use links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites.

Search engines use links to discover new web pages, and determine how well a page should rank in their results. It can build your business through building relationships, sending referral traffic, emphasize your brand, and make your website “find-able”.

What it comes down to is there are two types of links;

1) “Natural” editorial links

“An example of a good reason may be a great piece of content that you’ve created which you then seeded with a few key influential bloggers, and through that process more bloggers have naturally become aware of it. This is hard to do and can take time, which is part of why these types of links are so highly valued. They are also the types of links that Google often hold up as great examples, indicating that they will stand the test of time.”

2) Manual “outreach” link building

“This is probably one of the most common types of link-building you’ll perform as an SEO, particularly if you’re just starting out or your business is still quite small and unknown. It involves manually contacting website owners and bloggers, asking them to link to you.”

Phew. So what does all of this mean? Well, let’s break this down into a TL;DR version for the lazy that want a summary of this rant.

• The web is like NYC, and search engines are like Uber driver service
• You create your website to be SEO friendly by using link, keywords, and original content to be easy to navigate to (like a distinguished address for the driver to take you to)
• Effective inbound tactics will not only draw traffic, but the right traffic; customers you are looking to connect to

So if you’re a marketer on the prowl to be the ideal candidate for digital marketing coordinator positions, I suggest you look into the Hubspot Certification and Google AdWords certification to really showcase your smart chops in this world wide game of seek and destroy.