Four Key Components of SEO
I like keeping things simple. And, although there is much to learn in order to do SEO properly, knowing a little about these four key components will help you avoid silly mistakes in optimizing your web site and get on your way to healthy, consistent web traffic.
Healthy External Links
Sometimes called back-links, external links are links from other web pages to pages on your web site (usually the home page but sometimes to internal pages). The more links from other webs sites to your web site will increase your site’s “Link Popularity”. Google considers each valid external link as a vote for your site. Some of these votes carry a lot of weight and can help your site move up in the rankings. The best kind of links to get are those that carry traffic with them. Try to think of each link as an “Ad” for your site and do your best to ignore promises of “PageRank” or “PR” as these tend to end up being worthless in the long run – bringing little or no traffic. Be sure to read The Right Way to Build Inbound Links before you start building up links. Anchor text will be an important key to getting a good ranking.
Smart Internal Links
By Smart Internal Links I mean easy to follow by both humans and robots. One type of internal link is your site’s menu. Not all menu designs are easy for robots to read (or humans for that matter). It should be easy to use for humans first, robots second. In order to be SEO friendly your site must have some way for robots to find their way around. This can be done several ways. One way is by making your site navigation text-based and easily readable by robots. Another way is to use Google’s Webmaster Tools and enter a sitemap to ensure all key pages are crawled by googlebot. Either way you are accomplishing one of the primary purposes of internal links: to get your site fully indexed by Google.
Great Page Titles
Your page title is Google’s introduction to the page. “Hello Google this is page <title>”. That title should be an exact description of what the page is about. Get your title right the first time and Google will reward you. If I have a page on which I am selling battery chargers for Nokia Cell Phones I will likely have a page title very similar to what I discern the main keyword search term will be for that product or group of products (i.e. “Battery Charger Nokia Cell Phone”).Be as specific as possible. Some people try to cover 27 possibilities in a page title “nokia battery chargers and accessories along with every other possible charger product in the uinverse”. Your page title is only as strong as the incoming anchor text links supporting it. So choose wisely. Decide what the page is truly about and set the page title. It is highly unlikely you will have 10-15 word anchor text links coming in to te page so a realistic page title is much easier to support with incoming links.
Proper Keywords
I do not advocate stuffing a page or web site with keywords, However you must be aware of your subject and be sure the theme you are writing about is well covered in the page text. For example: if the page you are working on has text content about Florida Vacation Homes it would be appropriate for you to use this phrase a reasonable amount of times within the page text. If you never used these words in the text, do not expect Google or any other major engine to recognize the theme of the page.
I always encourage my web clients to write naturally about their product, service or subject. Usually the keywords they are trying to cover come out naturally. Typically a little tweaking will help them fine tune a page for a specific keyword but quite honestly most traffic on any site comes from naturally occuring peripheral phrases. For example: although Florida Vacation Homes may be a great keyword phrase, it is likely the competition for that phrase is HUGE. It may be a client gains far more traffic for phrases such as “low cost florida vacation home” or “inexpensive vacation home near tampa”. These may be naturally occurring phrases within the site text for which there is little competition. Writing naturally and having ample and rich content will always win out over going after a single high competition keyword.
Like Music to Google’s Ears
Although I’ve mentioned only these four major SEO components, there is obviously much more to SEO than these. When all the major and minor components of SEO work together they become like music to Google’s ears. Google gets a clear message and knows exactly what your site is about and where it belongs in the search engine as regards categorization and ranking.
The most important lesson you can learn about SEO is: great content will bring traffic. Over time you will learn the secrets of how to publicize yourself and the world will beat a path to your web pages.
