Basics of SEO

Written on August 3, 2009 – 3:36 pm | by Nick |

The reason I love Search Engine Optimization is that it is constantly evolving and extremely competitive.  You have to work hard – every day – to make certain your client sites are outperforming the competition.  There is so much that goes into the Basics of SEO that just putting yourself in a position to grab the low hanging fruit can be very time consuming.

Let’s start with a top-to-bottom look at the basics.  A website should have the Title Tags optimized, the URLs optimized and images properly tagged.  Now, I am well aware that SEOs will argue how much of a priority each one of these tactics should be, I want to be clear that I’ve never experienced anything other than success implementing all of them.

There are plenty of other, more in-depth and aggressive SEO tactics, but you really can’t go wrong with those.  In addition, you need to do serious keyword research and implement anchor text throughout the site.  Determine what types of searches your audience is conducting that will get them to your site.  This will mean optimizing for Branded and Unbranded keywords and key phrases.  It could even mean optimizing for keywords that you wouldn’t normally think people would type into a search engine when looking for your type of business.  Again, that is the great part of SEO – The hunt for visitors is on-going and very complex.

Many companies do not have the time or the resources to do this on their own.  It is perfectly understandable.  How many mid-size companies have the ability to deploy SEO friendly copywriting, conversion rate optimization and page-by-page analysis to squeeze the most potential out of their site?  That is why hiring an SEO Consultant is a very prudent move.

While I have been discussing on-page optimization there is a whole other component to SEO.  And that is off-page optimization.  This means getting other sites – sites that are respected in the industry – to link back to your site.  Link building takes an incredible amount of time.  Especially, when you don’t know how to begin, grow and maintain a linking strategy.  And the only way to do this is to have a clean, well optimized site that has a specific Call to Action along with informative and unique content.

And you thought I was joking about how much work goes into optimizing a site!