There is lots of mysticism when it comes to SEO, lots of tricks and unless you are well versed in the dark arts how do you tell the good from the bad? Here is my honest and straight guide to doing SEO.
I am no SEO expert, it’s an industry that more often than not leaves me feeling dirty, cheap and used every time I encounter it. Half the practitioners are nothing better than Snake Oil salesmen, in short SEO is a dirty word in my book. Yet I still do SEO work for my clients. Why?
SEO is essentially the following 5 points.
- Content, something original and useful
- Titles
- Meta Description
- Share it
- Use Google Products to get the data into the belly of the beast
For most people these are the final things they need to address though. THE most important thing about SEO is making your website accessible to users. Stop seeing your website as a gateway to fame or riches and start asking yourself, why would I visit this site, why would I ever want to come back? When you start answering those questions honestly you are able to start ensuring Google and the other search engines want to send you traffic.
For the vast majority of websites, not mortgage or holidays, these SEO tips will have a dramatic increase in the SEO performance of your site. Yes you could build an inter connecting network of blogs that funnel PageRank onto your landing pages. However, that will be useless if you’ve not covered these points first. These are the basics.
Content, Something original and useful
This is the corner-stone of your site, why it exists. It might be about the designs of early 20th century bike chainrings, or it might be selling website designs. Either way, you need something interesting and original on your site. You can’t get away with copying all the other sites, paraphrasing their content and writing salacious headlines. That traffic is pointless unless you’re trying to rip off advertisers. It’s the type of traffic that sticks around only as long as it takes them to realise you’ve done nothing new.
Creating your own content isn’t the easiest or quickest way to riches and fame, sorry, but it is great for the internet. The internet is still craving more content, people want more interesting, thoughtful, insightful content than you could ever produce.
Titles
Page and article titles are some of the most important content you can write. If you look at the title bar for on your browser you’ll notice the page is titled, “How To Do Search Engine Optimisation Honestly”. This article has the headline “Honest SEO”. The page title (in the browser window) contains the idea that is central to this post, and as such, it’s keywords. The search engines will use this to try and match what users search for. The articles title is supposed to be a bit simpler as its intended mainly for users, however it still has the central idea as a H1 tag to reinforces “honest” and “SEO”.
Meta Description
The meta description is the second most important element to SEO. This is the summary of the page, and at 160 characters is fairly short. This shows up as the text below the link in search results. Once again if you’ll need to get all the keywords for the page in here, but it need to be in whole sentences as the computers are smart these days. If some one searches for a phrase that is in the description, you stand to do fairly well.
Share it.
The best content or ideas take on a life of their own. In the geek world we have Hacker News do well on there and you’ll find people linking to you from all over the internet, people will still be visiting the article for months. Essentially the more an item is shared the more important it appears to the search engines, you might need to give it a helping hand and start it off.
RSS feeds are a great way of tech savvy visitors keeping in touch with everything that you publish on the site. Tweeting and sharing on other social media will expose it to a wider audience. No amount of pushing will make a boring blog post popular though, let it occur naturally.
Use Google products to get the data into the belly of the beast
Google provide a plethora of products the enable you to get data straight into their systems. Feedburner will process your RSS feeds, sanitising them and providing you stats on how many readers and what content is popular. Google Webmasters gives you information on your search engine results, in return for submitting a sitemap. The sitemap enables the google robots to find all the pages on your site. Google provide a whole list of products that you can use to get your content into Google quickly and efficiently.
That list will get you quite some way.