Beginners Guide to SEO

Success in search engines today depends nearly entirely on keyword density in your visible text, i.e., your content, links to and from relevant sites that are themselves well-linked, i.e. links popularity, paid inclusion in key directories, search-based paid placement also known as pay-per-click advertising, search engine press releases and comprehensive tracking to maintain search engine visibility and increase traffic and conversion from your target audience.

The opportunity to do branding via search creates a great opportunity to think a bit deeper about the way search is planned, bought, and measured.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) n. - The process of modifying attributes of a website to improve its position on one or more search engines, gaining visibility in front of the target audience.

What does that mean? Simply put, SEO allows your target customer to find your site using search terms, or keywords, that are most relevant to your product or service. There are two key factors in SEO: the size of your target market and the ability to be found "relevant".

Optimized Content


Why is content important? The search engines use content to determine ranking relevancy. Any reputable search engine optimization campaign will include addition of new, updated, or changed content to your webpages, The search engines also look for new, added fresh content to ensure that the website is still relevant. Content should be between 300 and 750 words on a page. Anything over amount that should be broken up into multiple pages. Websites with over 50 pages usually fare the best in search engine ranking and results returned.

Title Tag


Your page title tag should be between seven (7) and twelve (12) words. These seven (7) to twelve (12) words should also be the same or close to the same as your meta keywords and meta description tags,. Also use them in the top three of the image alt text tags.

Meta Tags


Meta Keywords - The spiders can only read so many characters here. Keep them to between 7 and 48 words.

Meta Description - Again the spiders only read so much in this tag. Keep it between 12 and 24 words.

Image Alt Tags


This is one area of search engine optimization often over looked but should not be. Image alt text allows speech to text reader applications to read to their vision impaired users. This is what is known as user optimization, which is truely what SEO is supposed to be.

Relevancy & Link Popularity


Each of the major search engines has a different method, or algorithm, for ranking sites in its database by the Internet searcher's keywords. To keep users coming back, search engines want searchers to be able to find quality information and therefore rank websites by relevancy. In this sense, your website must have content relevant to what is searched for, and be considered popular by the quality of links into your site. Establishing quality links not only improves your rankings, but drives targeted traffic from similar, though non-competing sites.

A well-executed link campaign is essential to boost your site in the Search Engine Results Pages. Link popularity is a ranking criteria used by the search engines. The basic idea behind link popularity is that high quality web sites tend to have more links pointing to them then low quality sites do. "Popular" sites (those with higher link popularity) are given a boost in search engine rankings. Link popularity is not just determined by the number of links alone. More important factors are the quality of links, the context of links, and the anchor text in the link.

Relevancy & Link Popularity


FACT: With a reported 4 billion Web pages on the World Wide Web, your site can easily be lost in the clutter.

FACT: 80-90% of Internet users rely on search engines to find websites.

FACT: Only 7-10% of Internet users look past the first three pages of search results.

Whether your business sells a product online or your site is a brochure for your established business services, can you afford to have potential customers not find your site? Particularly as more of the world has access to the Internet? Recent reports from Nielson's Net Rating service indicate nearly 300 million people are online across the world, with 150 million in North American homes. And that's not even counting access through businesses.

Contact us to get your SEO campaign started.