Hey there;
I was hanging out on Lynn Terry’s very cool private elite mastermind forum (LearningWithLynn.com) this morning and I ran into someone who asked for a simple explanation of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Here is what the poster said (I deleted and changed some stuff to protect her identity since LearningWithLynn.com is a private forum):
This may sound silly to the Pros, but your help would be appreciated as I really need to understand this aspect of my business.
I have been writing blog posts to my main site and have seen a number of them go to #1 on Google in a few days. The only thing I do is focus on keywords and especially long-tail keywords as taught by Lynn.
While I’m happy that it’s happening I’d like to understand more. Help, please?!
I took this question to be “please help me understand more about SEO,” and I thought you might be interested in my reply. (Note that this discussion will probably be pretty long, which is one of the things I love about LearningWithLynn.com.)
Like most things in life, the 80/20 rule applies.
When someone opens google.com and types "best wireless headset for pc" (without the quotes) what happens?
Google does two things (basically):
- It get the list of all the pages (pages, not sites) that it knows about (all teh pages it has indexed) that have something to do with "best wireless headset for pc"
- It ranks them in order of importance the best it can and show the best ones first.
Remember, Google’s goal is ALWAYS to guess what will help the searcher the most and put that at the top of the list. They need to do that, because if they do a poor job finding what you are looking for, you will use Bing.com next time and Google will lose ad revenue. Simple as that.
OK — as the page owner/author there are only 2 things you can do
- Optimize stuff on the page (on-page SEO)
- Optimize stuff off the page (off-page SEO)
By on-page optimization, of course, I mean making sure that you do the things that tell Google what your web page is about. By far, the most important thing is having your keywords in your HTML title tag. But, you might also want to have your keywords in the URL (or the domain name for specific highly targeted applications). You also want to have your keywords and related content in the article.
Off-page optimization, on the other hand, refers to making sure that Google knows that other people value your page.
As you probably already know, Google tries to determine if people value your page by counting the number of backlinks to your page. You can think of them as votes for your page.
People say that there are over 200 factors considered in the Google search engine algorithm. However, it’s been shown numerous times that one of the most important factors is the number of backlinks to your site.
Note that G seems to consider the anchor text of the link when trying to decide what your page is actually about (and/or how much to value the link). That means that if it sees links that say Click here for a review of the "best wireless headset for pc" — that helps more than a link with unrelated keywords.
So, think 80/20 rule for SEO. Get links with your keywords in the anchor text, and make sure your keywords are in your title tag, URL and article.
Don’t believe me about the importance of backlinks?
Check this out. Google "click here" without the quotes. What do you see? (You can see the results here).
That’s right — acrobat reader. Why? Because there are 1.6M pages out there that say "click here" to get acrobat reader. Note that "click here" is NOWHERE on the page.
If you need help getting your web business going (or getting to the next level), come hang out with us at LearningWithLynn.com. You’ll love it (I do).
