SEO in 3 Simple Steps
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SEO is just one of those things… You think you need it, everyone tells you your website needs it, and you see all of these companies claiming they do all of this different stuff that you know nothing about. Not to mention the price points are all over the map. Contrary to popular belief though, SEO isn’t that complicated, and Ill prove it to you.
In my book, SEO comes down to three critical components (not 18 million) and were going to go over them below.
#1 – Keyword Research
Research is the foundation of all SEO work. What it does is simple – it finds you keywords that will be profitable if your site ranked organically for them. It’s not as a simple as guessing what people type into Google though, the proper kind of keyword research dives into all aspects of the market to find good target keywords. For example, If I were to do keyword research for your site, I would look at some of the following:
- Keywords you provide
- Synonyms
- Misspellings
- Competitors target keywords
- Volume
- Complexity for ranking
Those are very large categories too, there are a million subroutines that must be done within each.
Keyword Research will help illuminate those hidden gems that have troves of people sitting with their credit card waiting to buy your stuff inside them. After all, if you rank for the wrong keyword, its useless. If you sell flowers and you rank for the word “cars” (gross over-generalization) how will that help you?
Anyone that offers to optimize your site or tries to sell you a backlink campaign without you having keyword research done should not be hired. Any SEO company that asks you for Keywords over suggesting they do the research to find them for you should also be avoided.
#2 – On-page Optimization
On-page optimization should be pretty self-explanatory. It’s a one-time process, and what it does is take the keywords you found in the keyword research, and then optimize your site and your pages so for those target keywords. Some of companies that optimize will include proofreading within their service as well. Optimization takes a look at a lot of different aspects of your site, including but not limited to:
- Title
- Meta Descriptions
- Headings
- Keyword Density
- Bold/italic words
- Image Alt/title tags
- Internal link structure
- Internal anchor text for links
On-page optimization should completely optimize your site for Google. If you’re lucky and the keywords you chose don’t have much competition, you’re likely to rank just off of the initial optimization. These days though, most of the time you’ll need backlinks for any moderately competitive keywords, which leads me to #3.
#3 – Off-Page Optimization
Off-page optimization is everything that affects your search engine ranking outside of your site. Most of the time, it can be summed up in one word: backlinks. Backlinks are links from all over the internet that point toward your site with the anchor text (the actual text of the link) being the keywords you chose in the research phase.
Off-page Optimization or getting backlinks is a pretty straightforward process, and it can be done a couple of different ways. A few of them are:
- Article marketing
- Blog Comments
- Site Partnerships
- Social bookmarking
- Guest Blogging
There is a ton of ways to get backlinks but there’s one thing you need to know: it’s about quality not quantity. If you get a single link from a site like CNN.com or LosAngelesTimes.com it can skyrocket your ranking, while thousands of low-level profile links couldn’t do half of that.
I mention this because there are tons of people out there from all over the world that sell backlinks, but all they do is spam your site across thousands of other sites. Do you end up ranking? Sometimes, but it’s not a good practice. First of all, Google is getting smarter. It’s only a matter of time before the search engine is completely social, and those links will be worthless.
Secondly, spamming your links on other people’s sites is equivalent to spraying graffiti with your name on a store down the street for marketing. You are damaging someone else’s property for your own ranking, so don’t do it.
That’s it
This is all you need to know about hiring someone for SEO. If they don’t do research, on-page optimization and off-page optimization, they aren’t worth it. Some will tell you that you can rank with just a monthly backlink plan, and while this is true to some extent, it’s like trying to float a paper boat. Paper boats float, but paper also comes apart in water over time.
Its best to get all of these services done by a single company, as each one does things their way. It’s better to have symmetry between the types of optimization you have then to have the very best from multiple services.
So, was this informative? Any questions?
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