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Part 1: Organic Search Results SEO Tutorial

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1. Introduction

Getting good search engine rankings is part art, part craft.  It boils down to this:  fill your website with lots of good written unique content and get lots of other relevant websites to link to yours. I can't stress enough the importance of having lots of content.

If you want your website to get the highest search engine rankings it possibly can, then read through this report and follow the instructions.  Some of this stuff you can do yourself and some of it can be done for you.

There are two types of search engine rankings:  organic rankings and paid rankings.  Organic rankings are the search engine results that appear in the main part of the search engine results page.  They’re what you typically think of as “search engine listings”.  They don’t cost anything to maintain once you’ve gotten them.  This first part of this report tells you how to get good organic search engine rankings. 

If you’ve got a monthly budget to spend on search engine advertising, if you want to supplement your organic search results, or if you need instant results, you’ll be interested in paid placement search engine ads.  These are the small text ads that appear in the search engine results pages on top of and to the right of the organic listings.  The second part of this report, Paid Placement, discusses this option.

2. What Search Engines Do

The typical search engine’s job is to be a catalog of all the stuff that’s out there on the internet.  But not just any old stuff—search engines have a preference for words.  Let’s use Google as an example of a typical search engine since it owns a good chunk of the search market.  Google likes websites with lots of words.  The more words your website has the more interested Google will be in it.  But not just any old words.  Google is constantly evolving to give higher rankings to those websites that contain useful, unique information. 

Unique is important.  If your website’s text is just a copy of someone else’s website text, don’t expect such great rankings for your website.  And what constitutes useful?  Say your website is about potatoes.  Don’t just write one page about potatoes.  Instead put in recipes, potato history, cultivation tips, games that feature potatoes, etc.  Try to think of as many things you can that makes your business interesting, then write about it. Be creative!

A note on Google: though they have a huge segment of the search market, they are by no means the be all and end all. MSN.com, Yahoo.com, and Ask.com are all significant players. Google only controls about a third to half of all searches, so even if you don't rank so well in Google, you may have a number one listing in Yahoo. It pays to check all these search engines for your rankings.

3. Choosing the Right Keyphrases

Before beginning a search engine optimization (aka SEO) campaign, you need to know what words you’re trying to get high rankings for and on which pages of your website.  It doesn’t make sense to try to get high rankings for your website.  Instead you should try to get high rankings for your website on specific pages for specific keyphrases.  This is because the search engines treat every page of your website as its own entity.  Generally speaking, search engines give rankings to individual web pages, not whole web sites.

Start a list.  The keyphrases you want to get high rankings for should be words that search engine users will type into the search engines when they’re looking for your service or product.  If you own a bed and breakfast in Asheville, North Carolina you’ll want the keyphrase “bed and breakfast in Asheville, North Carolina”.  You’ll also want lots of variants such as “b&b in Asheville, NC” and “bed and breakfast near North Carolina”.  Write all these down as separate keyphrases.  Be creative and try to think of substitute words.  Some people might not think “b&b” and might think “inn” or “lodging” instead.

If your website is an online store, your list of keyphrases can be a list of all your products, plus the things people would search for when looking for your products.

Once you have this list ready, I’ll go through the list and decide which are the really good ones and which ones aren’t worth it.  The good keyphrases are ones that people actually search for a lot, but that don’t have much competition from other websites.  The bad keyphrases are the ones that people don’t really search for a lot, or that have too much competition.  To go back to the b&b example, "b&b" on its own would be a bad choice because there’s simply too much competition.  However, "b&b in Asheville, NC" is a much better choice*, and more targeted as well.

* Crunch42 optimized ashevillebba.com for "Asheville b&b" and it consistently ranks close to the top in Google for this phrase.

In general, one word keyphrases are bad choices because they’re too popular.  Exceptions exist, of course, especially if the one word is a brand name or other unique word.  Using the b&b example, another bad choice would be “b&b in Asheville, NC near a store that sells banana ice cream”.  No one would search for that and it would be a waste of time and money to try to get good rankings for that (though it would be easy).

So make a list and try to come up with at least three keyphrases, and as many more as you can think of.  Be sure to number each phrase in the order of their importance.

Another way of making this list this that may be simpler for you is to just write a comma separated list like so:  Asheville, NC, North Carolina, b&b, bed and breakfast, inn, lodging.  Note that plurals of words should be listed separately.

4. Creating Content

Search engines love websites with lots of unique, word-rich content.  This means you should write as much as possible about your products or services.  This website is essentially an advertisement for my web design business, yet I have over 100 pages of informational articles in it. I've gotten a good number of client leads from random web surfers finding my articles.

In addition to the typical information that you find on websites (the home page, the about us page), informational articles (like this one), tutorials, even an online journal of your activities (known as a “blog”) can be helpful in getting the search engines to love your website.

If your website has a lot of competition, creating lots of high quality text content is ESSENTIAL.  You may even need to write new stuff on an ongoing basis.

You should try to write your content for the web, which isn’t the same as writing for print publication.  This means short and sweet.  Paragraphs should be 3 to 4 lines long with 12 to 15 words per line.  Use headlines and sub-headlines.  Boldface important points.  Use bulleted lists when possible.  Try to write with a personal “voice” instead of a clinically dry one.

You might want to borrow the "AIDA" model from the field of copywriting when writing some of your pages.  AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.  Start your page out with an attention grabbing headline.  Then build up the reader’s interest.  Make them desire what you offer.  End the page with a call to action.  Obviously some pages more than others can take advantage of AIDA, your home page in particular.

And don't use images of text - use regular old HTML text. Images of text look like big blank spots to the search engines.

5. Optimizing the Site

Each individual web page can normally be set up to get good rankings for up to three keyphrases.  This process is called “optimization”.  So what if you want to get good rankings for ten keyphrases but your home page is already optimized for its three phrases?  Simple, just optimize other pages of your site.  It’s also possible to optimize more than three keyphrases per page, but more than two or three starts to water down the effectiveness of the additional ones.

Optimizing the site involves tinkering a little bit with each web page’s HTML code.  For the technically minded, this involves correctly setting each website page’s title, meta description, and h1 tags with your keyphrase(s).  It also involves using the keyphrases as link text.  In your title tags put keyphrases first, then the company name.

For the non-technically minded, here’s what you should do:  when you write your site’s content, use your keyphrases in the headline(s), once in the first paragraph, once in the middle of the page, and once at the end.  Your web designer will do the rest.

6. Inbound Links & Page Rank

Google and other search engines determine how highly to rank your web page for a particular keyphrase depending on—in addition to how well it’s optimized—how popular your page is.  Popularity is measured by counting how many other web pages link to your page.  These links to your website from other websites are called inbound links.  So if you have a web page optimized for “potato salad recipe” and there’s a competitor’s web page somewhere out there that’s also optimized for “potato salad recipe”, then the higher ranking will probably go to whichever web page has more inbound links.

Inbound links to a web page in your site include other web pages in your own website!  That’s why it’s important to have a Site Map page that links to every page of your website.

In reality, popularity calculations are (much) more complicated than this, because it involves not only a count of how many pages are linking to your page but also a measure of how “important” Google thinks each of these inbound links is—importance being based on a closely guarded mathematical formula they call Page Rank. 

The important thing to remember is this:  get lots of links from other reputable and relevant websites.  If your website has a lot of competition, this is critical!

How do you get inbound links?  Three ways:  (1) ask for them from the webmasters of other sites (see the Link Pages section below), (2) submit your site to multiple online directories (see the Directories section further on), and/or (3) pay for them.  People will also sometimes link to your website without you asking them to (and often without them asking you first).  This is usually a good thing.

Paying third parties for links typically costs $20 to $100 per month, depending on how much Page Rank the inbound link has.  If you need a “quick fix” of search engine ranking and have money to blow, this might be an option for you to consider.  Be advised that the search engines consider this kind of thing a practice that they’d like to ban but don’t currently have the technology to do.  So if you pay for a link now, sometime in the future Google will figure out a way to discount that link. So don't rely solely on paid links.

7. Link Pages / LINKS FROM OTHER SITES

No doubt you’ve seen websites with link pages.  A well-built links page can be a benefit to your site as well as every site you link to.  If Google sees that your links page is authoritative, it will reflect well on the authoritativeness of your own website (more authority equals more Page Rank).  So try to link to the “big players” in your industry if possible.  Of course, you may not want to link to your direct competitors.

Once you have a links page, you’ll find that people will email you out of the blue saying they’ve already linked to you and would you please link to them.  There are some types of websites you must avoid link exchanges with:

• Websites that have absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter of yours.
• Gambling, pharmacy, or pornography sites (unless your site has to do with these topics).
• Websites that are simply collections of random links not organized in any meaningful way.  These are sometimes called free-for-all (FFA) sites.

If you want to build up your links, you can certainly go ahead and start putting links to other websites on your links page.  Be sure that sites that you link to are relevant to the subject matter of your own site.  It would be a good idea to also send an email to the webmasters of each of the sites you link to and ask them to link back to you in return.  You can use an email like this:

That boldfaced paragraph there with the HTML code, your web designer should tell you what actual HTML code to put in once your site is built.

If you have more than 25 links on your links page, it would be a good idea to break up the page into multiple pages.  If you have a ton of links, you might even want to create different categories and make a page for each category.  But remember, all links should be relevant to the topic of your own website.  Doesn’t have to be a perfect match, but at least within the same “realm of knowledge”.

A final note on getting links from other websites. Google and other search engines will give greater importance to a link coming from the middle of an article about your site's subject matter as opposed to a directory of links. For example, say your local paper wrote an article about snails and mentioned your snail recipe website within that article. That link would count a lot more than a link from that same local paper's website's links page. So if possible, try to get incoming links from informational articles as opposed to link pages.

In fact, as of early 2008, more and more SEO professionals are starting to question whether link pages are even worth the effort. "Reciprocal links" between two links pages are probably not worth too much, so whenever possible try to get a link to your site from the other site's content pages.

Check out this page (popup) for more detailed information and strategies on link building.

8. Web Directories

Web directories are like search engines in that their job is to catalog what’s out there on the internet, but the difference is that they’re human-edited and they sometimes limit themselves to a certain topic or region. 

The most important directory to get listed in is dmoz.org, but there are several hundred more, smaller directories out there.  Crunch42 Web Services can submit your site to 100 or 200 directories for you for $100 or $150, respectively.  Submitting your site to a directory is not a guarantee that it will be listed, but these directories generally have a 90%+ acceptance rate, though it may take a few months with some of them to get around to doing anything with your information.

The value of a directory listing lies in the fact that if you get listed with them, that will result in an inbound link to your website, with its attendant increase in Page Rank.

9. Google Local

If your website is an extension of a local "brick-and-mortar" business, you should submit your business listing to Google Local at http://local.google.com/ (the Add/Edit Business link at bottom left).

10. SEO Myths and Scams

Scam:  all those spam emails about your search engine rankings.

Toss out any emails you get about submitting your website to “millions of search engines”.  There are only a small handful that matter (google, yahoo, msn, and ask).

Myth:  your “meta tags” are all-important.

Meta tags were all-important ten years ago.  These days they’re hardly noticed by the search engines.  You should set your “meta description” tag on your home page and perhaps a few other main pages, but don’t give it much more thought.  The exception is if your webpage has absolutely no text content (as in a Flash website).  In these cases a meta description tag is useful. But meta keywords tags are totally useless these days.

Scam:  you can get guaranteed top rankings for X amount of money.

No one can get you top rankings for all keyphrases all the time.  Especially not in competitive industries unless you’ve got thousands or even millions of dollars to spend.  Be leery of anyone who guarantees top rankings.

More information on search engine facts and fiction, do’s and don’ts can be gotten straight from the horse’s mouth at:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/facts.html
http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/guidelines.html

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