How To Do SEO

By Eric Holter, February 2008

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How To Do SEO

»	How To Do SEO
2.	The Main Subject
3.	Found in Translation
4.	Implementing SEO
5.	Subjective SEO

While social media sites like Facebook may be getting all the press these days, it's important to remember that search not only started it all, but is still the most effective Internet marketing channel.

Any Internet marketing strategy needs to be heavily weighted toward search. And search engine optimization is the first place to start. I've written quite a bit about search engine optimization in the past, but this month I'll begin a two part video series on how Newfangled approaches search engine optimization. Here in part one I'll cover the nitty-gritty of how to optimize a specific web page for search engines, and next month, I'll review our search engine performance using Google Analytics.

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Studies consistently show that organic search results, the ones that display on the main body of search results pages, significantly out perform purchased AdWords that appear along top and right side of search results. Organic search results are free, they get clicked much more frequently, and they carry a sense of trust and authority over their link-for-hire cousins--precisely because they can't be bought. The value of organic search results make the extra work needed to optimize your pages well worth the effort.

Optimizing Every Page

Search engine optimization is not about getting your home page to the top of search results. It's about optimizing every single page on your site--since they all contribute to traffic. Some pages will get a lot of traffic, and some will just get a little, but a lot of a little is still a lot. In fact, as you'll see next month when we review our search traffic in Google Analytics, sometimes infrequently visited pages can be more valuable than home page visits. It has to do with the searcher's intent--but I'll come back to that concept later.

Search engines like Google are very secretive about how they rank pages for search phrases, but whatever subtleties they may employ, they never wander far from the basics. The most important criteria for any search engine are the words on the page.

It's every search engine's goal to help you find what you're looking for. Like digital librarians they sift though billions of pages in their website stacks to find the very best resources to recommend. When you think about how little they have to go on--the few words we enter into a search box, contrasted with how many sources there are to consider--among the billions of web pages, the fact that search engines work at all is pretty amazing.

Becoming an Assistant Librarian

If a search engine is like a librarian, then search engine optimization is like being a librarian's assistant.

As an assistant librarian, it's your job to make sure every book--or in this case, every web page--is properly identified, categorized, and cataloged, and tagged to make the librarian's job easier. next >

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Comments

Susan Petracco	February 28, 2008 10:50 AM Eric, Thank you for the article - it's a great introduction into optimizing a site for search engines, and your approach is terrific. I do think it's important to note the importance of the description meta tag, however. You write, "You can also place your target words and phrases in the keywords and description fields....As a result search engines pretty much ignore these fields." While this is true in terms of the rank of a webpage, the description field is not ignored when it comes to the display of a webpage. Often, search engines (including Google) display the description meta tag as the "blurb" of text that appears below the site name in the results pages. This blurb influences the decision of the user to click through to the site, so taking the time to write a good description meta tag is really important to click-thrus, if not to rankings. On the other hand, I totally agree with you about the keywords meta tag. We're even exploring removing that altogether, in an effort to simplify clients' on-site SEO maintenance.
Eric Holter	February 28, 2008 11:55 AM Hi Susan. Thanks for the comment. You're right of course. Description are sometimes used in the search results. I tend to prefer the "snippets" that Google generates with the relevant parts of the page text in bold, so I don't usually give my descriptions much thought. Maybe I should.
Chris von Nieda	April 2, 2008 2:30 AM Eric: I enjoyed this article thanks. I think the main thing I took away from it (as a fairly new SEO and site owner) is that I nee d to optimize EVERY page of my site. That makes a lot of sense. And a great example of this is this site: www.sqlmanager.net. These guys dominate Google search results. I was looking for a tool today to manage a database and they were everywhere! Anyway... ths is not a plug for them but this was something that blew me away today. Keep up the good work!
Vikash Singh	April 19, 2008 6:41 AM Can we get link back from youtube.com.