Search Engine Optimization – sounds fairly simple right? Just optimize web pages for search engines. Done. It turns out that it’s a bit more complicated than that.

So, what is SEO? According to wikipedia, “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results – often referred to as “natural,” “organic,” or “earned” results.”

Basically, SEO can be thought of as making certain decisions and taking certain actions with the goal of increasing the odds that your webpages will be returned as close to the top of the search results as possible for certain queries.  In other words, making your webpages more relevant and important than your competitors.

Think of it like this: You put up a website. How do people find it among the nearly 1 billion websites now live? Unless a user types in your exact website URL, your webpages will be combined with all other webpages and ranked by the search engines. What can you do to make your pages more likely to be listed on the first page so that the right audience can find you? The answer is SEO.

Why is this important? Statistics show that most searchers don’t go beyond the first page of results. Furthermore, according to this 2014 CTR Study from seoClarity, the top 3 positions receive approximately 19%, 11% and 8% click-through-rates, respectively. For mobile devices the numbers quite different, with the top 3 positions having CTR’s of approximately 28%, 9%, 4% respectively.

 

One key metric to use to help determine if you are getting the wrong audience is bounce-rate. Bounce-rate is a measure of how often a user lands on a page and has no more interaction with the page and leaves. Here’s a fictitious, simplified example: a user types the query ‘jaguar’ into a search engine and sees a link titled ‘mighty jaguars’ and clicks. The landing page is about the animal, but the user wanted information about the NFL team so they click the back button and leave the page. This would be a signal to the search engine that this webpage was not a relevant result for this query term. If this scenario happens enough times, this particular webpage will get pushed further and further down the results because it is drawing the wrong audience for this particular search term.

The bottom line is that the closer to the top of the search results you are, the higher your CTR will be. Of course none of that matters if your webpages are drawing the wrong audience.

Basic SEO Considerations

There are basically 2 general areas to consider when thinking about SEO on-page and off-page. On-page encompasses everything directly related to your pages – think page titles, h1 tags, domain name, URL structures, page speed, content, etc. Off-page refers to everything external to your site like backlinks, social mentions, article citations, social profiles, etc.

So, how should you go about optimizing your webpages? There are many outdated methods, as well as sub-optimal practices (known as black-hat) that I won’t go into. For the purposes of this basic overview I’ll list only legitimate (known as white-hat) methods:

On-page:

• Ensure pages are mobile-friendly (see my previous post on why this is important)
• Include keywords in Title tags and H1 tags
• Ensure Title tags and H1 tags are different
• Do not use Meta Keywords tag
• Meta Description tag is optional, but I would suggest adding a well-written description tag
• Ensure all images have alt tags
• Ensure all images are optimized
• Ensure pages are optimized for speed (compress images, configure server to compress pages)
• Ensure content is not duplicated and has substance (avoid thin-content)
• Ensure pages have good layout with clearly defined main content areas and good supplemental content(eg. navigation areas, search boxes, etc.)
• Ensure your pages are returning the proper status codes (e.g. 200, 301, 404, etc.)

Off-page:

• Establish backlinks from reputable sources
• Establish a good backlink profile
• Disavow backlinks from illegitimate sources
• Optimize backlink anchor text where possible(ie. don’t use ‘click here for more info’ and try to incorporate keywords)
• Optimize social profiles, especially Twitter
• Optimize reputation where possible(especially yelp, yellowpages, etc.)
• Ensure all name, address, phone numbers (NAP) are consistent across the web (e.g., make sure you don’t have different addresses listed in yelp and your website)

There are many, many more methods and strategies to implement depending on the goals of the company, the type of business, the level of competition, etc. The main thing to keep in mind is that SEO is an ongoing process and not a set-it-and-forget-it type of thing.