SEO Basics – If You Build it RIGHT, They Will Come

Posted by Upright Team

When you first built your site, did you have high hopes that “If you build it, they will come”? Sometimes website designers and site owners alike often get caught up in that field of internet dreams and forget the very important step of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It might have worked for Kevin Costner in the 1989 Oscar Nominated “Field of Dreams“, but in the internet world, if you just create a web site without SEO in mind, the visitors may not start pouring in like the Chicago Black Sox did in the movie.

What keywords do you want to rank for?

The first step of any SEO program is to identify your keywords. What do you want to rank for? More importantly, what is your market searching for? There are a variety of useful tools out there to help you pick the right keywords to focus on:

Google Search Based Keyword Tool
Search for your keyword in Google, then scroll to the bottom and look at related keywords.
Google’s Wonder Wheel

Choose your keywords wisely. One to two word phrases might be very competitive and tough to rank for. Longer phrases bring more targeted traffic, which generally converts better. And don’t try to rank for phrases that no one’s searching for either. Whatever you choose, be prepared to write content to support those keywords. If you don’t have anything to say about a keyword, then you’re probably not an expert on that subject and you won’t rank for it.

Build the Foundation

The next thing to do is create a foundation on which to build your marketing strategy. This foundation is metrics, meaning the metrics of site visitor behavior. You want to rank well because good rankings for the right keywords bring you traffic. You want that traffic to convert, meaning complete an action whether it’s to contact you and become a lead, to make a purchase, or interact with your site in some other way. If you’re not identifying your traffic and where it comes from and what they do when they visit your site, then you might as well put on a blindfold and go play in traffic. You’ll get the about the same results. You’ll get hit by a truck. It will hurt. And then, when another truck is coming, you’ll get hit again because you won’t see it coming. With metrics, you want to know what efforts in your marketing strategy are producing a good ROI. Build on the things that work and can the plans that get you no traffic or conversions.

Find the Balance

As you build your site – which is an ongoing, ever evolving, never ending process – you need to play a balancing act between three important elements: Technical, Content, and Links. Think of it like a three legged stool. You need all those legs to hold you up. If you neglect one, the stool gets unstable and you fall. Ouch. Getting hit by a truck? Falling off a stool? SEO isn’t supposed to be painful. So pay attention – here comes the stuff you need to know to protect yourself.

Technical – Make sure the search engines can spider your site and index your content. And make sure once they get to your site, that they know exactly what you’re all about.

Making your site comply to W3C standards is a good start. If your site is compliant, then you can be sure that the engines can view it with no problems. Validate your site at http://validator.w3.org/ and fix any issues you may find.
Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and make sure Google isn’t encountering any crawl errors or other errors within your site. If Google’s talking, you better be listening.
Make sure you have a robots.txt file, even if it’s just an empty file that you create with notepad, call it robots.txt, and upload it the root of your site (the same place you upload your home page). The engines request that file every time they visit your site before they visit any other pages because this file tells them what they are not allowed to index. If the file isn’t there, they get a 404 error. Not the first impression you want to be making on the engines.
Proper use of title tag, meta tags, headings, alt tags, hyperlinks and content is crucial. If your page is about chocolate chip cookies, then that phrase should be in all of these areas. Follow best practices and don’t spam. Don’t stuff your meta tags with words that don’t appear on the page and make sure your title and meta tags are unique on every page of your site.

Content – This means text, images, video, blogs, forums… everything within the contents of your page. Prove that you’re an expert on your subject. Offer useful information for your visitors. Engage them with video, surveys, interactive elements, or blogs and forums where they can comment. Content is still the reigning king so don’t neglect it. All forms of content are ranking now in the search engine results, so the more variety in content you have, the wider your visibility will be.

Links – This means inbound, outbound, and internal links.

Inbound links from a variety of sites is important, but make sure you get some authority level sites to rank for you. Look for links in industry related directories. Find out who is linking to your competition by using backlink tools and try to get some of them to link to you. Yahoo has a great backlinks tool that allows you to view a sampling of the links to any given site. Link building is a time consuming but equally beneficial process.
Outbound links describe how you link to other sites. Think of your users and share information with them on other related sites that you’ve found useful. By linking out to other quality sites, you show the engines that you are part of the sharing of information.
Internal links are the links within your site. How you link your pages together is important and can help the engines get a clear picture of your overall themes and keywords. Make sure you link to other pages in your site using keywords that describe the page that you’re linking to. Avoid things like “click here” or “home” as the hyperlinks and use keywords where it makes sense. Create a sitemap for your site and link every page to it so the engines can find all your content within a couple clicks.

Now you’re armed with a basic list of guidelines to get you started. This is just a start, but should position you for success if you keep building on it. SEO is much more complex, but sometimes a good head start is what you need to get some revenue flowing. Then, you can enlist the help of an SEO firm such as Upright Communications where you can benefit from years of experience and training and technical knowledge that stretches far beyond the surface that we’ve just skimmed here.

NOW if you build it, they will come.