How it Works

Let me start by saying that you don’t need to read any of this unless you really want to. I know how this stuff works and you truly don’t have to worry about it unless you choose to.

However, I keep getting calls asking what it is I actually do so for the more technically inclined and curious, I am providing this “skim the surface” summary.

Basically this process in known as Search Engine Optimization or, more often, just SEO. This is the process of preparing a web page in the best possible way to encourage the search engines to rank it highly on their results pages for certain keywords.

This process includes both on-page and off-page factors. On-page SEO includes things such as the title of the document, using heading tags, and using the keywords on the page. Off-page SEO mainly consists of pages that link to your site and the text they use to link to you, called anchor text.

On-page optimization used to be the only thing that really mattered. Many years ago, all you had to do to get onto the first page of a search engine was stuff your pages and meta tags full of the same keyword over and over.

Then, along came Google that said they thought that less importance should be placed on the on-page factors and more weight given to the off-page items and this is where all of the search engines have gone now.

Both are still important but let’s take a quick look at what really counts.

First and one of the areas that many websites fail is the *Title* of the page. I’m referring to what shows up at the top of the browser window and not what you have on the page as a headline or in your URL.

Many use their company name as the title but that alone tells the Search Engines absolutely nothing regarding what your website is about. Look at the titles of major websites like ATT.com, Ford.com and CNN.com and you will note that every one of them uses descriptive keywords about what they are offering in their titles.

So, if you should happen to be in the dog grooming business and your company name is Pampered Pets, then you should not have just Pampered Pets as your page title as you are declaring that is what you are about. A much better choice in this case would be something like: Dog Grooming by Pampered Pets

Next is the need to have good, descriptive text content. Many websites have gone to Flash and Video presentations as the main components of their webpages and those may look great to a visitor but the Search Engines can’t see them at all – might as well be a big blank space as far as Google is concerned. Same is true for images – search engines don’t see them.

So, back to my example of the Pampered Pets website. They could have a great flash presentation or movie showing the grooming of all of these beautiful dogs and then some text underneath saying they had the best prices in town and were conveniently located in downtown AnyWhere.

The result being that Google would only see the part about the prices and the location and wouldn’t have a clue from the content it can see that the company was in the dog grooming business.

There is nothing wrong with using Flash and Video as people love them but you need to be certain that there is also enough keyword rich text for the search engines to love you. I will work with either your in-house people or my own contract copy writers to beef up your text content if it seems to be needed.

Also, your website should have both a sitemap and RSS feeds using xml code. These are not intended to be looked at by humans but searchbots love them and properly used should greatly help your search engine position.

There’s a lot more that could be said about on-page optimization but this is intended as a brief overview and not an SEO training course.

According to Google and all of the other major Search Engines, this is the Grizzly Bear of what counts.

What we are really talking about is LINKS from other pages. The underlying logic is that links to a page from other pages is an indication of how important the world considers your page --- they are like votes.

There are a number of what I call sub-factors involved here as it’s more than just the number of links (votes) as all links are definitely not created equal. An extreme example and back to my Pampered Pets site is that a link from the American Kennel Club would be seen as a much more important “vote” than a link from a classified ad site although both would be recognized.

Also important is the Anchor Text of the link. Those are the actual words that are normally shown in blue and underlined that a person would click on to follow a link. This Anchor Text helps notify the Search Engines as to what the target site is important for.

So, a link like http://pamperedpets.com (remember, I just made this up) is a vote but not a real strong one as there is no explanation of what keywords the target site is supposedly important for. However, a link for Dog Grooming that goes to exactly the same page will get a lot more weight as it clearly “says” what it is voting for.

Also, important is a linking strategy that stacks links based on increasing importance of the sites which gives a multiplier effect to the votes your site is getting. I create many separate pages, blogs and links for each of the individual keywords we are targeting that all funnel towards your main site as shown on the illustration below.

What very often happens is that these authority blogs and micro-sites will also get highly ranked by Google and it is fairly common for my clients to end up with multiple different listings on the first couple pages of search results that all end up going back to their main site.

I just finished working with a client last week and as of today we have 4 out of 10 listings on the first page of Google for his main search term, 3 out of 10 on the second page and 5 out of 10 on the third page. That’s called Search Engine Domination

OK, I think that’s enough for now and you should have a good basic understanding of what I will do for you and what techniques will be used to get your website well positioned on Google and other search results:

1) Work with you to insure that your on-page issues are correct with good page titles, tags, rss feeds and text content.

2) Additionally, I will create an authority network of blogs, micro-sites, articles and web 2.0 sites for each and every one of our selected keywords that will all funnel back to your main webpage to give it maximum importance in the "eyes" of the search engines

We can't expect instant results but I normally hope to get your website listed on the first page of Google within a few weeks.