A Solid Guide To SEO
Search engine optimization is a complex subject, especially when you consider all the information and misinformation readily available online. Unfortunately it’s often hard to tell which is which. Does the latest tactic you’re reading about work? Does it work for all sites? Only some sites? Or is just another crackpot theory that sounds reasonable, but will never help to improve search traffic to your site?
Let’s face it SEO can become very confusing. The good news is it doesn’t have to be. The basics of SEO are actually quite easy to understand and if you give yourself a good foundation in learning search engine optimization you’ll be able to sort fact from fiction much more easily and you’ll have the tools to delve into more advanced SEO concepts.
This series of posts isn’t going to teach you the latest trendy trick that probably doesn’t work anyway. The goal of these post is to help you build an SEO foundation and point you in the right direction for further study. Through the course of this series (part I, II and III) will look at 3 major aspects of SEO each covered in one post.
- General Approach and Research. This first post will look at how you should be thinking about SEO as well as the keyword research you’ll want to do prior to building your site
- On-Site SEO. The second post in the series will discuss how to build a search engine friendly site and how to write content with SEO in mind.
- Off-Site SEO. The last post in the series will look at building links into your site and page and discuss analytics so you can determine what’s been working and what hasn’t and use the information to continue to improve your SEO efforts.
How To Approach SEO
Search engine optimization is a subset of marketing. It should fit into your overall marketing plan and not be your marketing plan. You can do everything wrong when it comes to SEO, never receive a single visitor from a search engine, and still have a very successful and profitable site. It might seem strange to read that in a post about SEO, but it’s important to understand.
Ironically if you take a step back and generally market yourself well some of the more difficult parts of SEO will take care of themselves. That’s not to say you should ignore SEO, but most of us don’t need to obsess over every little detail. There are many, many factors that determine where a page will rank in search results. Obsessing over one of those factors doesn’t make sense. Try to see the forest instead of staring intently at a single tree.
SEO is not a set it and forget proposition. It’s an iterative process. You do what you can, measure the results, and continue to improve. You can’t SEO a site in a day or month. As with marketing in general, SEO is never ending. It also changes daily and what works for one site may not work for another.
Fortunately the basic principles are fairly constant and building a solid foundation in SEO understanding will carry you much further that trying to exploit the tactic du jour.
That said, SEO can be generally categorized into 5 different aspects:
- Keyword research
- Search engine friendly site development
- On-page SEO
- Link Building
- Analytics
Each of the above is important and they all work together. The whole s greater than the sum of the parts. Let’s talk about each of the above in more detail.