Search Engine Optimization 101

I remember when I made my very first website and I hired an international supplier to optimize my site. To my surprise, when I looked around to see what their back-linking strategy was, I found them spamming sites all over the web with my URL.

I’ve since, optimized sites on my own rather than outsourcing and have found some great results. The list below outlines some tactics for Search Engine Optimization that won’t result in your site getting blacklisted and wont keep you up at night wondering if what you’ve done was or was not ethical.

Keyword Research

It’s a known fact that one of the most important things to do when optimizing your website is to research your keywords. The act of researching keywords is directly related to your selection of the best keyword phrases that will direct users to your website. Many people believe they can use a variety of different phrases and simply be optimized for the web without ever thinking about relevance.

You need to optimize your website based on the relevance of the content on your site to what the users is looking for. For example, if you’re a Small Coffee shop and you’re looking to increase your rank on Google you’re not going to optimize your site for words like “Drink”. Instead, you’ll optimize for words more specific like “Organic Coffee Shop” and the location of your shop. You do this because it’s more likely that someone will search “Coffee Shops in Boston” than “Drinks” when looking for a place to enjoy a warm beverage.

On-Page Optimization

With the emergence of Google Instant, it’s become clear that being optimized for the first page is more important than ever. On-Page optimization is a simple tactic that individuals can implement in the matter of a few hours. There are five key elements in on-page optimization that you should look at when optimizing your content.

Title Tags: If you’ve made the mistake of ignoring titles and headers when creating content, it’s time to wake up. Titles are the first thing scanned by Search bots and should be a title that’s not only appealing to the bot but also to your audience. Your Title Tags are often the first thing that a user will read when finding your website. If your title tag sounds spammy they’ll go else where, if your title tag is appealing you just might win a new fan.

Keyword Optimization: Do not stuff your content with a bunch of keywords. I repeat. Do not stuff your content with a bunch of keywords. Once you do this you immediately send the wrong message to your readers and turn them away from your content. It’s all about striking a balance between keywords and valuable.

Link Optimization: Sending and receiving backlinks has become a standard for anyone who is looking to get serious about their content marketing. A good backlink would come from using relevant keywords like “Social Media News” instead of “Click here“.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is a tactic that many individuals overlook when optimizing their websites. Intenral linking is important because it puts you in a position where you can kill two birds with one stone. Essentially, you are able to improve the user experience on your website while also increasing your page rank. I’d recommend going through your site, section by section, page by page, and post by post then determining what links would make sense from a users perspective. While these internal links won’t improve your page ranks as much as an external link; they definitely help!

Developing Linkbait

Link-bait has received a poor wrap recently as some people think it’s a sleazy way to generate traffic and backlinks. While there is no question that some people do in fact create bad-practice link bait, there are ways to develop link-bait without losing sleep. A few great ways to develop link bait (See what I did there) can be found all across the web. Some of the great tips in the above article from Adam Singer are as follows:

• Create an Authority Listed Tagged to Your Brand
• Create a custom WordPress Theme
• Invite Others to Republish your content
• Run a Blogging Contest
• Create Insanely Useful Lists

Infographic Creation

Photo credit: jentsoi

I’ve been a big fan of info-graphics since I started watching these things go viral time and time again. It’s very rare that you find an info-graphic that doesn’t get picked up on several sites. The effectiveness of great info-graphics for SEO purposes hit me when I saw Flowtowns “The Evolution of Geek” was shared like a bad virus around the web. Infographics are a great way to receive links and is definitely a tactic that shouldn’t be overlooked.

If I haven’t said it before, when it comes to SEO – Links and Keywords are your bread and butter. Do whatever you can to optimize your site but make sure you do it with good intentions. Several people get caught up with the optimization obsession to a point where the content is unreadable and the bounce rate goes through the roof.

Have any more SEO tactics you’d like to share with us? Share them in the comments section. And if you want to re-post this list to your site, feel free! Just make sure you get a good nights sleep and link back…