So You Want To Learn SEO?

In order to understand what SEO is, and how it works, we should first understand how the search engines themselves work.

When search engines were first created, they were used for scholarly papers. The idea was that these papers would be available across the whole world. Links were then created for the times when a person would cite another paper. Then, as one paper was cited by more and more papers, it would be more easily found by the search algorithms because it had received so many votes of confidence from other papers as being a very credible source.

Since then, search algorithms have greatly changed, but the main standard for how well a site will rank is still the number of links to any particular site from other sites. These links are seen by the search algorithm as votes of confidence that the site will be useful to people.

Now that you have a basic understanding of how the search engines work, let's jump into how we can optimize our site!

Now that we are ready to optimize our site, let's go ahead and talk about the two different kinds of optimization that we will focus on. The first is on-site optimization, and the second is off-site optimization.

On-site (or sometimes referred to as on-page) optimization refers to the many different aspects of the site that you personally control. We'll go into more depth later, but this type of optimization includes items such as your page title, your headings, your URL structure, and so on.

Off-site optimization mainly refers to getting other sites to link back to your website. There are many different tactics to do this, and many different ways to judge how effective those links you are gaining are. We'll also talk about this in more detail later in the lens.

While most practitioners of SEO will agree that a majority of your ranking comes from the amount and quality of the backlinks that are pointing at your site, there is still a percentage of the ranking algorithm that is determined from on-site factors. You control your site, you control how it looks, so why not take the time to give your site the extra boost that could push it just above you competitors?

First we're going to take a look at site-level optimization.

Generally, the first thing that I do is check to make sure that I have the proper 301 redirect in place so that only one version of my site will show, either the www version or the non-www version. For example, if I decide that I want my site to be www.mysite.com, then I want users to be redirected to www.mysite.com when they type mysite.com into the web browser. If this isn't taken care of, then you are missing out on a lot of potential link juice.

Second, I will go through and look at the URLs on the site. You generally want to make sure that the URLs on the site are keyword rich. For example, if I have a page on my site that I want to rank for the keyword 'blue widgets' then I want to make sure that the URL for that page is something along the lines of www.mysite.com/blue-widgets. You might even decide that you want to have it be something like www.mysite.com/best-blue-widgets in order to get another variation of keywords in there. (As a side note, you should always use a dash to separate words because Google has said that they view the dash as a space except where semantically appropriate for it to be used as a dash.) These types of URLs are generally pretty easy to get set up in most types of CMSs such as WordPress, however they are not generally set up this way by default. Many times the URLs will look something like www.mysite.com/?p=1553 which is not well optimized for the search engines.

Finally, a sitemap for your site can help make sure that your site gets fully crawled and indexed by the search engine robots. A sitemap is generally stored in the root directory of your server and has a hierarchical listing of all the important pages on your site. The sitemap can generally be viewed by going to www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml.

Those are the main on-site optimization techniques that affect the entire site. Now let's look a little more closely at page-level optimization.

The first aspect of page level optimization I look at is the

Now to the fun part of SEO, link building! But first, before we dive into how we can build our links, let's talk about what makes a link a good link!

First, a link is created by using an anchor tag (< a >). Within the anchor tag, there is the href which contains the URL that we want to link to. Then we have the anchor text, which is the text that is contained between the opening and closing anchor tags. Here is an example of what the HTML code looks like for a link: blue widgets

The kinds of links that we want should have a few different properties. First, we want to make sure that the links are pointing to the page that we are trying to rank, such as the blue widgets page. Second, we want to make sure that we have the anchor text as the keyword that we want to rank for. By a site linking to us with this correct anchor text, it helps show the search engine bots that our site is relevant for that search phrase. Finally, the more authoritative a site is, the better it is to get a link from that site. The search engines give much more weight to a link from cnn.com than to a link from your aunt's blog about her cats.

Now let's talk about building links! We'll go over eight different link building techniques that can be used to help your site rank!

1) Manual Link Submissions/Requests

A manual link submission/request is when you reach out to a website owner and ask him/her if they are willing to put a link to your site on their website. Pretty simple, but not extremely scalable.

2) Competitive Link Research/Acquisition

This involves using tools such as raventools.com and ahrefs.com to check the sites that your competitors have obtained links from. Then you attempt to get links from those sites as well.

3) Links via Embedded Content

This involves having some kind of badge or widget that you entice others to put on their websites. These link back to whichever page you desire, are extremely scalable, and can be very high quality links.

4) Linkbait & Viral Campaigns

Creating viral content to attract links is an extremely difficult thing to do, but can be very valuable when done correctly. A well-executed viral campaign can bring in more links in a few days than you could get in an entire month. Common linkbait methods are infographics and videos.

5) Content, Technology & API Licensing

Once you have created the licensed content or API, you can scale this infinitely as long as you can find people willing to use it.

6) Partnerships, Exchanges & Trades

You can exchange links with other, non-competing websites, or even partner with people that would be competitors but are in geographically diverse locations.

7) Paid Links

Sometimes you can find websites that would be willing to put a link to your site on their site if you pay them for it. This can be risky though if caught by Google because it can lead to penalties.

8) Link Reclamation

Because the web is so dynamic, many times there will be broken links to pages that no longer exist on your site. Contacting the webmaster of those sites and asking them to update the link is a simple way to maintain those quality links to your site.

Here are a few SEO tools to help you get started on your journey!

serpIQ:
serpIQ is considered by many professional SEOs to be the ultimate SEO research tool. In a nutshell, it helps you do things like keyword research, competitive analysis, and on-page optimization. They have a free account so head on over and take advantage of it now!

Microsite Masters:
An important aspect of SEO is seeing how well your site is ranking for specific keywords. Microsite Masters (MSM) not only tracks your rankings for you, but allows you to make notes of what link building you are doing so that you can see what kind of ROI you are getting for your linking efforts. They also have a free account for you to track a few keywords at a time!