Category Archives: Common Sense SEO

Common Sense SEO Part 6: Start Now

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Now that you’ve read all of the first five topics of Common Sense SEO, the question that should be asked is what can I do now to get started right away. First you should remember to start on something now and iterate as you need to, planning only gets you so far if you don’t have something to test in the process, that’s just the developer in me speaking though. You need to get a few simple things off the ground first for your business while you plan out your content etc, want to make sure that your companies office is listed on Google Places, this is sort of like Google’s version of the yellow pages and is one of the first results triggered if someone does a search for your company in your area as well as gives them a map of where you are at.

Make sure that you guys are listed on every free ratings site possible including Yelp and others, don’t pay for this kind of service from companies like Yellow Pages and other, there are plenty free popular sites out there that your money will be better spent elsewhere. If you have employees that deal with your customers, tell them to ask the customer to rate or recommend you guys on Yelp, LinkedIn, Google Places, and all the other sites you’ve registered on, give them an easy to remember web address forwarder to link directly to where you want them to go like yourwebsite.com/ yelp or yourwebsite.com/google etc, having a page like yourwebsite.com/recommend will help save your customer’s time and effort.

Having had their website on the web for many years is a plus in terms of presence so if you don’t have a site yet, register one right away, if you have an older site than keep it online. With a little bit of updating and some hours of reading you can disrupt your industry quickly and easily using the web so don’t feel like you have to first plan everything out and then put up a site. From here you have two directions that you can take here on out.

If your efforts are individual (aka you are a salesman or employee working in a big company) and you need to focus on making personal sales or doing your own job to market the firm but have little to no say on the direction that your company takes from a marketing strategy, then you’ll want to focus on making social contacts with potential buyers and networking your personal brand as you represent your firm out in public.

Your personal brand is you, and whether you stay at your current company or move on to something else marketing your personal brand now will pay off no matter where you are at, I would look for and buy yourname.com or something similar to use as your personal resume/portfolio/blog/or whatever the hell you want kind of site for down the road as well as see if you can get @yourname on twitter or a facebook fan page for keeping in touch with business contacts on Facebook. LinkedIn is a must if you work more in Business to Business industry and I’ll talk about that more next.

If your target customers are businesses than you need to focus almost all your efforts on LinkedIn, it’s okay to have a Facebook page or twitter account for your company that you can push but you main focus should be creating a LinkedIn Company Profile pages and encourage anyone who works at your firm to join and add themselves to it. You then look for who your target audience is, in my case I look mainly for firms with large office spaces and target them first making sure that I add any contact I make on the street to my LinkedIn account. This is not about the quick sale but rather relationship building.

If I’m a consumer based company than my individual marketing will be more directed at making personal sales online, take the initiative and setup on your personal site stuff that you think your company should or could use on their site, use your personal brand to test ideas and strategies for your company and then when they become successful you can present it to your boss as a marketable idea, if your company sees that you took the initiative and made sales they should respect you for thinking outside the box, if they fire you or reprimand you for marketing outside of “company site” then you should quit and go find a better job at a company that actually understands marketing. Too many firms outsource their marketing efforts which to me is silly and down right outdated, after all who better to sell your product or service, then the very people who make it and use it themselves.

If you’re company is small enough to where they are looking to you to help them better their overall internet strategy then you should put your focus on not just the networking, though this is important as well, but rather on the look, feel and service that your company can provide online. This will bring in business more than anything as it will tell people that you understand how to do business online and plan on being around for a long while.

This strategy isn’t for everyone but if your company can afford it then it should also set aside an ad budget for Google Adwords, if they haven’t already set aside money for this, they should do this before they pay for any other kind of advertising including print and mailers. You’ll also need to make sure that whatever the ad words are connected to, aka a website or a form are able to generate leads for your firm and simply not just linking to your companies website. You loose money that way when you get someone to come to your site and don’t smack them with the ability to do something once they get there.

The Google Adwords keyword system as I explained before is sort of like an auction based marketplace so figuring out which work best for your company to increase sales is a full time job as one of my own family members has learned over the years. The next big thing in all honesty is to convince your bosses to redo their website, this is a point of contention I’ve had with people who think that their designs are fine but my thought process is that if your site looks like something from the 90′s then you as a company looks old and only certain types of people will want to do business with you. I would most overwhelmingly suggest WordPress as a platform for any business simply because it’s easy to use once you learn it and is versatile for anything you want to do.

You can hire someone to build you a custom design or I would also suggest you check out a sites like ThemeForest, I spend hours looking at designs which is one of the reasons I got out of the design business a long time ago. Way too much effort for little pay when there are guys guys out there that can do a much better job for less. Taking a standard good looking theme and changing it out is easy enough for anyone to do once you find one that fits your need.

Once on the WordPress platform there is a million different things that your company can do to engage people on their website off the shelf, allow customers to pay invoices online directly on your website, allow auto generated quotes based off customer submitted information so that they don’t have to wait for someone to call them back with a quote or email them etc.

I’ve seen companies use WordPress for everything from allowing customer to login with an account and schedule the best times to have something done based on their schedule or allowing them to expand the company by franchising the technology they are using off the same website to different regions of the country, the sky is the limit.

There are tons of more stuff you can and should do to help promote your company but this is a start, all the items I mentioned in this chapter are things you can do now while you plan out your strategy and start to put your focus on what really matters for your business, making money online. Much of this work is do once and reap the benefits later kind of stuff so putting the effort into setting it up will pay for itself down the road if you’re patient and know what you’re doing.

One book I would ask you to read above all else is “What Would Google Do” by Jeff Jarvis, one of the best books for understanding how to properly think through your business model in today’s connected world and it outlines what works as well as what doesn’t. As a developer my life dictates that if I have something to do in mind, that I start doing it now and iterate as I need to. This book is a great example as I set out to format everything I knew about marketing online and will continuously change it as things change and features or methods change trying to give you the most common sense approach to doing this on the web.

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Common Sense SEO Part 5: Analysis

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The final part of proper SEO is doing an Analysis of your own site compared to others. Check out how you compare to other similar websites. You need to monitor your traffic rank as well and see if your optimizations and new content are showing benefits. You will be able to draw conclusions from your competitors and other sites that are related to your business. There are hundreds of sites that will review your site’s data for you such as Grader.com or Alexa.com. Google Analytics also helps you but you can’t really use it to check out your competition. The easiest way to find out who your competitor is would be by searching Google for the keyword you want and finding the guy that’s at the top of the page. Then do a search on one of the sites I talked about and see where they are ranked and how many inbound links as well as indexed pages they have on Google. This will give you an idea of what to shoot for in the long run and are the most important part of your analysis strategy.

If you are trying to enter a market and want to see if a specific keyword can be achieved, you can again use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to either search for specific key words and see how many people search for them both Globally and Locally (US) every month. Another important thing to look at in this tool is the ability to see trends, the small green blocks on the right hand corner when you search will tell you if the search trend is increasing per month or decreasing over time. You can click on the key word to pull it up on Google or the best part is search using your website domain name and see what key words your website come up in to try and see if you need to work on increasing your rankings with a keyword or if you are not even coming up on a key word you’ve been trying for. Try putting your competitors website and see where they fit and whether or not you need to start changing some of your content to compete properly with them.

Another way to see if a keyword is worth going after is by checking out the end of a Google search query. When you search for a keyword, at the top of the address bar next to the end of the Google address place the following characters exactly “&start=990″. This will then pull up your Google search in reverse order and give you the very tail end of your Google search. At the very bottom you will receive a very interesting statement that goes much like this, “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 656 already displayed.” Your number could vary greatly during your search but this number represents the number of sites Google is willing to catalog for a specific key word. The lower the number the better chances you have if you write good content of getting into the top rankings, the larger your number is the less likely you will be able to reach the top. A good point of reference is to avoid key words with more than 700 cached sites. Anything below that is easy to work with and you should definitely go after that key word by creating relevant content on your site.

The biggest difference in marketing your website is that you can’t simply throw money at it, well you can if you advertise on Google but you can’t just depend on ads like you can in regular marketing. You need to think differently about your site and your marketing strategy by creating systems that will help you solidify a more permanent ranking on Google that isn’t inflated by ad money. Using Social Media also helps you do that because more people will find the content you are creating interesting and hopefully they will create back links or inbound links to increase your position. The more content you create on your sites (aka more posts and pages) the more Google will have to catalog and the higher in ranking you will go.

The goal is to have at a minimum 100 search worthy items to include pages or posts on any topic or subject that has to do with what your website is about at least. This is why many businesses try to focus on just one site that has all of their products and services verses many sites that have many products and services but the benefit of having multiple sites is that they can link to one another and create a network that Google considers in numbering your back links. If you don’t have time to write out blog posts, news articles, press releases, recipes, product reviews or any number of content you plan on having on your site then you can hire an intern who’s only job is to take the day to day information they are seeing in the office or in your field and blog about them online creating an article a day or more depending on how fast you want your content up.

The beauty of systems like WordPress is that you can set yourself up as editor to make sure you review everything that goes through if that is a major concern in your business. Another great and cheap tool are sites like Fiverr.com where people post things they are willing to do for $5 dollars. Their social media section is a treasure trove of opportunities ranging from having someone write one or two articles for you or having them create back links for you. The negative side of this of course is that you have to check up and make sure they did it otherwise you are wasting your money but whether it’s an intern, an employee or yourself who does it, once the content is up it stays up forever and using the social media automated posting tools I spoke about earlier there isn’t much more that you have to do with those posts.

Use every opportunity you can to create content for your websites, as I am writing these 5 things for common sense SEO, I am also posting them on my site as individual blog posts each, I will also be putting them into a book to give away for free on my website and may print them out on brochures to give to clients. I am using an opportunity that I have to explain these facts to you as also a means to build up my site content and thus a means of getting more Google Juice. If you are sending out an email explaining some part of your business, put that information on your site. If you get to speak in public, try to record it and post it on your site for people to watch your speeches. Some companies post daily on their blogs if not hourly when they are hosting events or at an event in order to generate content that can be searched later. This is what much of the tech industry does and quite successfully may I add to increase their common sense SEO.

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Common Sense SEO Part 4: Conversion

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Getting your website found by people is fun and seeing the number of unique visitors visiting your site per day is a great moral booster. You’re writing articles and producing videos (creating remarkable content), you’ve learned the essence of what SEO is by now (Optimize), and you’re using all the social media sites and running email and pay per click campaigns (Promote). At the end of the day, however, you are not doing this for fun. You are also not in this for traffic. The goal is quality sales leads and customers, so let’s focus now on converting as much of your traffic as possible to leads and customers. There are a ton of ways of doing this online and many more depending on how you want your site to run.

As you already know there are services like Salesforce.com and SugarCRM.com that allow you to build online customer resource management systems using their software. Other programs like WordPress have similar functionality but not at the level of most of these other services. Regardless of what you use to stay in touch with your customers, the most important part of website conversion is being able to get the information from the person visiting your website and into those systems either through weekly updates or in most cases automatically. Many of the same tools you would use to stay in touch with customers or to keep track of interested clients such as having a mailing list or collecting customer information through a form or survey can be easily transitioned onto online. Other interesting new features allow your users to log into your site using Facebook or Twitter which means they no longer have to fill anything out and you can collect their information instantly with just the press of a button.

Though a little bit harder to setup than the usual mailing list or contact form, using Facebook or Twitter connect will allow you to collect the information you need to stay in touch with your customers and has helped websites like Fiverr.com and Digg.com to grow exponentially in users because you are less likely to fill out a form to register to a site than if you can just press a button and connect through your social media. Most CRM services actually provide you with the code necessary to place a form on your site where the information can be automatically entered into their systems. Some content management systems will allow you to automatically respond to customer concerns based off of keywords in their emails or special selections helping you to automate responses to customers. To hark on my previous comments on social media, creating things like Facebook pages will also allow you to collect customer information for people who may Like you on Facebook or follow you on Twitter but may not ever visit your site yet have shown interest in your product or service.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a standard way to easily deliver content to visitors after they’ve left your website but they’re still interested in your subject. RSS is commonly used with blogs, news feeds, and other formatted news or other sources of information. Putting your content on sites like Google Reader, Feedburner and the iTunes store will help people keep up with your site’s content that may not necessarily always visit your site as well. Conversion or contact forms are the primary way to get leads from your website. Collect contact information from your visitors so that you can follow up with them later and be in touch. Without forms, you can’t convert your website traffic into customers. Shopping carts in general are nothing more than a very useful and complicated contact form where people can also order your products and services directly.

If you are a products based business and you want to start selling more online then you can implement an inexpensive e-commerce solution that equates to connecting your inventory to your website and allowing you to be able to go about your day to do business without necessarily having to update your site inventory all the time. This is a big step for most retailers wanting to go online because it requires a change in the way they run their business and many feel like they don’t understand the technology well enough to implement this sort of automated online system. It really depends on the direction you want to go in but there is a reason why sites like Amazon and Zappos are so efficient in the way they do business online. Either way the basic idea here is to pull in information from your customers so that you can contact them down the road. Finally I want to make sure we cover the final step of common sense SEO and that is website Analysis to see exactly where your site is actually at in the big picture of the internet.

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Common Sense SEO Part 3: Promotion & Social Media

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Now that you are producing remarkable content and optimizing it for search engines and other channels, you are ready to start promoting your content. There are many ways to promote a website but only a few are cheap. The reason why Google makes as much money as it does is because it takes advertising and creates a system where by you don’t have to pay for ads that you don’t use. The pay per clicks way of doing web ads has been around for over a decade but only Google mixing it with their heavy traffic on their website and providing it to other sites with a system that reads the site’s content and gives you the best ads compared could really master internet advertising. I know a lot of people that use this method of promoting their sites and it’s fine if you have the money but can get expensive. This system is usually great for online retailers trying to sell a product or service businesses trying to sell directly to someone in need of their services. Google keywords work in an auction system so basically the more popular the keywords are the more expensive they will be to purchase for ad space. Everybody knows this but what most people don’t know are the downfalls of this sort of advertising, the first being that you can’t control who clicks on your ads.

In the past the problem was related to location, so if you had an ad for a pizza place in New York, you could use up your ad revenue having people who couldn’t even order from you clicking and using up your ad money. Since then Google has fixed this with hyper local which allows you to choose whether or not you want people in your area or throughout the country or even the world to see your ads. You can even advertising in specific areas while not advertising in others much like you can with regular local TV or Radio ads. The second downfall is that ads don’t create permanence online, that means that if you have a ton of traffic coming to your site from ads, as soon as your ad money runs out so does the traffic. Yes you can get a bit of a bump in your Google rankings if you get a flood of visitors but overtime that rating will go down as you stop getting new visitors to your site. This is why using other methods to increase traffic like creating inbound or back links to your site and building content are so much more vital than paying for ads because it’s a more permanent solution and will keep your site’s popularity and thus rankings up in the long run. In short the ad system is great if you have a product you want to sell quickly and directly to the public but usually business to business companies don’t do well with ads since people click thinking they will be able to purchase or buy something but end up finding that they can’t buy directly and the ad was wasted.

The second way of promoting your site online is through social media, this will also only work if you have a product or service worth promoting to the general public. There are different social media platforms for different target markets, you’re not going to market your enterprise services or business to business on MySpace but LinkedIn might be your mecca for promoting your business using social media. A company that sells a product or service to teenagers may want to use MySpace and Facebook and may skip LinkedIn all together. Either way there is one social media site that crosses all those boundaries and that is Twitter. There is way to much hype associated with Twitter and way to many businesses put all their efforts in learning everything they can about it as if it’s going to help them increase sales and that is just not the case. Social Media can only do two things for your business and I’ve listed them below so you have an idea of why it is important but you shouldn’t believe all the hype behind it.

First Twitter and other sites help you create back links, If you have a site that produces recipes or a company that has regular products or services that are launched it helps you pass that information on to people who are more likely to post links to it somewhere of value like their websites or forums and create back or inbound links for your website. The is really the only reason why a company should absolutely have a Facebook or Twitter account at least. It also ties into having more content on your site, the more stuff you have on your site to work with the more likely someone will repost or re-tweet it on theirs and you get Google juice in the process. This is why you see every large company always giving out their Twitter and Facebook profiles on commercials and in person asking people to follow them. They understand the likely possibility that even if one in 100 people following them reposts their blog article or message on their blogs or websites, than that create a back link that will permanently increase their business ranking at a quarter of the cost. The more followers you have, the more times this may occur which is why it’s called cheap advertising. A big problem small businesses have is that they don’t have the man power to stay on top of these things or post their blogs on these sites. Services like Ping.fm are perfect for businesses wanting to use social media to reach out to people who can possibly create back links for them, ping allows for instant submission of content to more than 50 different social media websites without you or your employees from having to go on and log into each of them and post your article, blog post, recipe etc…

The beauty of using a content management system like WordPress is that they have plugins capable of automatically posting to services like Ping the minute you Publish a blog post and thus it saves you from even having to worry about keeping up with Social Media. There is one plugin which I enjoy the most that takes your old posts and will send them to Twitter at a random interval of your choosing so that your content is always being redistributed online once a week, a day or even a minute if you have enough website content to not have to repeat yourself and it saves you hundreds of dollars from having to hire someone who would do that for you in the old days. I’m in the process of working on one that does the same random interval routine but for Ping.fm so that I can reach all 50 social media platforms with random articles from my site regularly. Then all you really have to do is make sure that people are adding you on Facebook, following you on Twitter and friending you on LinkedIn either through your regular advertising, product packaging or even on your website and you have an automatic pipeline to their attention.

The second thing Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz and all these platforms are good for is customer service, If you promote your customers to post on their twitter accounts with a hashtag # and your company or product name (aka #myProduct) any time they have a problem or a question with your product or service. Then you can see instant on demand feedback that people are having and solving their problems on the spot if it is an important one will give you an edge that few businesses actually understand. There are both plugins and services which will email you every time someone hash tags or just types in your company name or product name so that your customer service rep has up to the minute information of issues if they come up. Not all businesses see the importance of this and this is not useful for all businesses. But some like Continental Airlines and Dell have embraced this as a means of getting to the heart of solving a problem without tying up expensive customer service lines with a representative and are now using it with those same customers to test out products and get honest feedback without having to pay for costly focus group. Again what it all comes down to is finding ways to create more and more inbound or back links in order to improve your site’s importance on any number of subjects and getting more eyeballs on your products and services. One of the reasons for Jeff Bezos decision to move Amazon away from just books and into any product online was his desire to see more of his products listed on search engines like Google and when they added a reviews system, it was really as a way to give users a means to create for them more content that was valuable and searchable. Next I’ll discuss the topic of Conversion or getting your customers to buy and stay or come back to your site again and again.

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Common Sense SEO Part 2: Optimization

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Optimizing your website’s content is a key step, however, to ensure you give your valuable content the best chance possible of drawing traffic from the web. In essence, this section is about maximizing your ROC – return on content. Using tools like WordPress is great because it streamlines your site’s overall code and does a lot of the optimizing for you. Everyone involved with SEO always talks about focusing on your meta keywords, that would have been valuable a year or two ago but since then Google has focused less on that and more on page titles and descriptions. Make sure that your page title isn’t just your company name or About Us. Ensure your titles are attractive and appealing and consist of the key words you want to push for. I can talk about this more in depth later on but the most important thing to remember is that Google’s focus is on the Page Title and Description because it’s what users see when they search on Google.

Similar to how newspapers and magazines use headings and sub-headings to help readers, websites can use special tags in their HTML. These tags not only help human readers read the content, they also help search engine spiders better understand the content on a page and what is most important. It is generally a good idea to use heading tags to help signal to the search engines, what the web page is about. Images are a great way to enhance a website from a user’s perspective. However, it is important to note that search engine crawlers cannot really “see” images. So, if you have lots of images that contain textual content within the image itself, this content will not be seen by the crawlers. HTML helps address this issue by providing a way to specify the textual content for an image using the “alt” attribute. The alt attribute allows web pages to assign specific text as the “alternative” content for images for those that cannot view the images themselves. This can be search engine crawlers or text-only web browsers.

Another very important part of optimizing your site that I’ve talked about before is both the age and registration length of your domain name. Most experts agree that you should register your domain for a long time, because search engines factor domain “stability” when looking at your pages. Google and other search engines like to see domains that have been registered for extended periods of time as this shows a commitment to the domain name. It also is an indicator that this website is not a temporary spam site. The reason why this is important consists of two parts. First there are plenty of fake sites out there that don’t actually want to show you anything and want to game Google’s ad system by getting you to visit them and click their ads. In order to avoid these sites Google has many tools they use but the most important is how old your site is and how long your site is registered for. The age of your site tells Google that you’ve been around for a long or reasonable amount of time and you’re not a spam site so you are worth increasing in rankings. Web sites that have been around for 15+ years like Yahoo and Amazon get a tremendous amount of ranking from being registered for so long. This is why it’s important to register a domain name you plan on using as soon as possible, even if you don’t use it down the road, having it registered before you even start planning what will be on the site is called aging the registration and can add plenty of Google juice for you down the road.

The second part is how long your domain is registered for, Google is pretty good at finding spam sites which means if a spam site has any hopes of making money it can’t be registered for more than a year because Google will eventually block it. In order to make it financially unreasonable to create spam sites Google has implemented a query that ranks sites based on length of registration, so a site registered for more than 1 year will be less likely to be a spam site and they will increase ranking for it. A site registered for 5 years gets a higher grade because Google knows they plan to be around for a while and sites registered for more than 10 years get special status. Though most big businesses have what is called permanent status on their domains meaning they are registered for an unlimited set of time in general you don’t need more than a 5 year registration mostly because you really don’t know how long you’ll want your site to last. For personal sites like mine (http://michaelbastos.com) or established business sites it’s okay to register for 10 or more years because it will increase your ranking since you plan on having that site around for the rest of you or your companies life.

Finally, One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites link to it or back links. The more links the better. Having links to your website from authoritative resources on the Internet helps you rank higher in search engines since these links are an indication that your website is trustworthy and contains good content. If you have relationships with big organizations that you do business with, ask them to create a back link to your site from their sites or if you are a manufacturer or wholesaler and sell to different online stores, have them create links to your site for product information and customer feedback. Many people will try and say that the more links you have the better but that only works on sites like Yahoo and Amazon with enough pull to really drive up your rankings. The general rule of thumb is that you only need one link per site and the more sites that link to you the more popular Google will make you. If you are a service business than ask your clients if they can link to your site and vice versa, this is why many web designers and artists have a client portfolio and why site developers put a link to their site in the footer of their work. To sum it all up this is why inbound or back links are important, if you can reach the magical number of about 1000 or more you will most likely make it to the first page of almost any key word you are trying to reach for. If you can reach 10,000 or more you will most likely be in a position that most businesses pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to place ads in each month, the top 5 in a search result. Next I will talk about Promotion or what a lot of people refer to as social media and what about it is valuable and what is not.

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Common Sense SEO Part 1: Creating Content

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Every web page has the potential to rank well in search engines and draw traffic from other sources, like social media sites and the blogosphere. Of course, whether a page draws traffic (and links) depends on whether it’s optimized and how remarkable (useful, interesting, etc.) it is. But in general, most pages do “ok” and contribute to the cause, so it’s both a quality and a quantity game. The more content you have on your site, the more there is for Google to search through and catalog and the more likely it is that someone will try to link to your site because they found something worth linking to. The word blog has been misused a bit over the years because people picture want to be journalist writing articles about food they liked or products they didn’t, what it really should be looked at is a way to create content that people will want to come back to and share with others again and again. So whether you call it a blog, a product showcase, a newsletter, a press release, a customer support forum, a favorite’s list (ie, recipes, books, product reviews, etc) or even a what’s new section, at the heart of it means you need to create something of value for each site that makes it more than just a glorified catalog of your companies products or services. This is really the best way to get links legitimately because you are telling Google that you have more to offer than other sites and businesses in your industry.

The reason why most business sites have blogs, a products listing and or regularly updated newsletter is not because they actually want to be news people or even have the time for it, it’s because it creates content for them that can be considered valuable and will be used to allow people to link more and more to their site. Some businesses like answers.com and amazon actually look at Google keywords using tools like the AdWord Key Word Tool before they create a post or product page in order to enhance the page’s individual SEO rankings based on the key words they are looking for and search for the ones that are less competitive to go after. It’s a lot easier to market to a bunch of key words at the bottom of the spectrum that to focus on a single overtly competitive keyword to go after.

A service business can create a blog where they can talk about things happening in their industry, a products business can create a review section where people tell them what they think of the product or in the case of business to business provide automated quotes for wholesale purchases like Alibaba.com did. Each blog post doesn’t have to be more than a paragraph per post but it pays dividends because people may be searching for something that doesn’t even come close to sounding like the title of your site but if they find that one niche post that talks about what they are concerned with then you have their attention. If that same post happens to be on the same site where you’re selling them a product or service that fits close to what they needed even better. A lot of sites also use blogging systems as a way to augment or help customers in finding out more information about their products or telling them product issues that they are having, again all of this creates content. Great sites usually have thousands of pages for Google to catalog and retain a much larger audience by shear content numbers. Either way the more stuff you put on the site the more valuable content you can give Google. Next we will talk about Optimizing your SEO.

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Common Sense SEO Introduction

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SEO is a term that can be easily grasped but rarely fully understood. In essence Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a way of improving your website’s ranking and thus your visibility online through a natural or organic form and the loosely related Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a way of paying for this kind of visibility. SEO can include more than just web pages and can be targeted today towards promoting and increasing the popularity of Video, Images as well as Local Information from a natural unpaid methods. If you own a website or are trying to start one then the very fundamental point to understand is that to successfully promote your website you must consider and understand how Search Engines work, what people are looking for and what they are actually typing into Google or Bing and how you can more closely link that to your company’s product or service.

Google isn’t the only search engine but my focus will be mostly on how they run their search system because it is essentially the industry standard across the internet for most search engines. The most important thing to remember about all of this is that there is no magical formula for bettering your site’s rankings and no matter how much you pay someone or what kind of promises they make, they cannot increase your rankings by some special mysterious way. What it really takes is an understanding of the technology and tools available and a willingness to implement it. The rules from Google change all the time which means what someone tells you one year may not work the following year, this is because Google is constantly changing their algorithms in order to keep up with all the fraud out there that tries to “game” the system. As things change and we learn about them we will update you as we do all of our former clients and will try to explain them in a way that will be easy to understand. So let me go over a few things and then we can get started.

Google works by running software called spiders or crawlers out onto the internet to automatically catalog as many websites as possible as quickly as possible. Picture someone who spends their entire day going online from website to website saving a copy of every page, every link in every page and keeping a comprehensive list of what’s linked to what and how many links a site gets. That’s essentially what Google does but instead of hiring someone to do this like it’s rival Yahoo use to in the 90′s, Google has very special software that does this automatically across millions of servers spread out throughout the world. This is Google’s best kept secret and being able to filter and sort through that data is what makes their search capabilities so good. The concept of SEO is simple, when you launch your site Google will catalog it completely using all the methods explained above and it will also keep track of people going to your site from Google.

They also search your site for links to other sites and will search other sites for links to your site, the more links you have to your site the more important Google thinks your site is on the internet so it gives you a higher level of importance. Some types of links don’t count and linking from certain websites don’t count because people have used these types and sites to try and game the system and give them as many links as possible. The more important the website is that is linking to your site the higher your site’s level of importance goes up. Cataloging the world’s websites isn’t the only Ace up Google’s sleeve, using a technology that exists on most internet browsers called server sessions or cookies, most sites are able to keep track of traffic going from one site to another. Google takes a look at the cookie data on your browser and essentially figures out where you have been as well as where you are going and adds all of this information to better their search data.

Google has also focused on something called hyper local which means if I search for Pizza from San Diego, instead of giving me the most popular pizza shop in New York with the highest ratings on Google, they will actually give you the most accurate local pizza place based on your location so it does a better job looking for the kind of things that you search for on a regular basis in your home town. With their new Google Instant feature, if you are logged into Google when you start your search and you look for a key word, your results may be completely different then those of your spouse or even those of your family on the other side of the country depending on what you have clicked on over time. Remember that if you are logged on Google saves everything you search for forever, this way it’s system can always provide you with a more narrowed down view of your interests.

If you search without being logged into Google, it still saves your data forever but it becomes anonymous usage data that it will continue to use to make it’s systems better. They still have data from when they’re very first test search so it gives you an idea of why their system works so well. The most important thing to take out of all of this is that no one can ever promise that if you pay them a few thousand they will get you on the top of search queries, because of hyper local and the way Google’s algorithm is structured, what you see may not be what others see so it’s pointless to do it through artificial means. There are a slew of factors that Google accounts for when ranking you but the most important one to remember are those links I told you about earlier. I will be covering all of this in the next few days cover the topics of Creating Content, Optimization, Promotion, Conversion and Analysis and break these important factors down for you piece by piece.

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