SEO Not For Dummies:
7 Optimization Tips Every Newbie Can Handle
“In a field that changes so quickly, it’s all too easy to get left behind if you are not constantly reading and learning” Brian Honigman on the importance of keeping up with the ever-changing digital marketing landscape.
Becoming kings (and queens!) of our SEO castles can be confusing and often times exasperating. We’ve heard that we should be creating stellar content, but rumor has it that our work might just land up in black hole or worse, the Google graveyard. Maybe you’re a newbie just beginning your SEO adventure. Maybe you’re a little bit curious about what this three letter acronym is all about. Maybe you saw an article pop up on Mashable or Buzzfeed that piqued your curiosity. Whatever the reason, here are 7 easy-to-understand optimizations for those wondering how to get started on their SEO journey.
Newbie, Meet Search Engine
“Search engines are like people who lack the ability to hear or see or sense anything that’s not presented to them in a code that they can interpret” Matthew Capala, SEO Like I’m 5.
Taking this into consideration helps one understand why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is so important. Search engines can’t be taken out for a drink or to an expensive dinner and schmoozed into boosting your webpage to the top. They need to be offered information that’s already translated into a language that they can understand.
1. Have Your (Content) Cake and Eat It Too
“The newest wave in the online marketing world is content marketing”, says Brian Honigman who has been featured in the NY Times and Forbes among an impressive list of others. Evidently, he knows a thing or two.
Content marketing and content strategy are crucial to building a successfully optimized website. These two aspects go hand in hand and need to be conquered by those looking to be kings of their SEO castles. In his book, SEO Like I’m 5, Capala gives a great metaphor, likening content marketing to baking a cake and content strategy to running the bakery. In today’s world there is so much happening online and an engaged audience well over the millions. The barriers to market entry have significantly lowered and everyone can build their own proverbial bakery and be their own baker. It all depends on how one creates the strategy. One key lesson is: play to your strengths. If video content is important to your strategy, but your acting skills aren’t on par with Brad Pitt, hire an actor from Fiverr.com and provide them with an Oscar worthy script. SEO success is based on creating compelling, original, native and authentic content that is engaging and can be shared by your audience or customers. Taking all of this into consideration, think of awesome content creation as the first step.
2. Ask and You Shall Receive: Tools
“The average shopper uses more than 10 sources of information to make a decision, linked to saving time, saving money and finding the best product” How To Win At ZMOT, Google Insights Study.
Consumers research widely before purchasing a product and are influenced by friends’ recommendations and online reviews. The new behavior is referred to as the New Mental Model and is guided by the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT).
One of the best ways to ensure you/ your product pops up during consumers’ research rounds is to understand what questions consumers are asking and providing a useful answer. This is another way of optimizing content and staying on top of the search pages. Using data to uncover the questions relevant to your industry or product is key in this SEO game. A plethora of tools are available online ranging from Google Trends for in depth charts showing popular search trends for the last 24 hours, 30 days and beyond. Others include Insights for Search, which shows details about searches specifically to your business, WebTrends, Adobe Omniture and Google Analytics. These resources can help keep bounce rates low (ideally, below 30%) and should be used to understand if users arriving at your website are finding what they’re looking for.
3. A Search Engine Element that Every Marketer Must Know
One of the most common search engine elements that the major search engines support and all marketers should know is “Rel=”connanical”. This is a crucial search engine term to understand because it has a weighted effect on your website’s ranking. Why? Because, search engines view each URL as if it were unique even if it contains the exact same content. Unless we tell the search engine that it’s identical information, the search engine will assume we’ve duplicated the content and presented it as unique. As a consequence, it will devalue the content and its potential rankings. It’s up to us; the webmasters of our own universe, to explicitly tell our search robot friends which page should count in web results as the singular “authoritative” version. This communication is done via HTML code. For those looking to delve further into technical optimizations (this is not as scary as it sounds!) make your way to Alex Chris’s practical post, about boosting your website on Google. As a digital marketing expert and SEO guru, he explains page titles, Meta descriptions and 404 pages for beginners in a newbie-friendly way that is clear and easy to understand.
4. How to Survive the Keyword Jungle
The keyword jungle is fierce! Competition for keywords is expensive and dominated by big league brands/companies that have large budgets to spend on the most popular keywords. In SEO Like I’m 5, we are introduced to the Golden Nugget Keyword (GNK). Not to be confused with the much-loved McDonalds menu item, the GNK is an untraditional or atypical word and phrase typed into a search engine by users. Finding these GNKs is valuable as, while fewer people are competing for them, they will still deliver visitors to your site. This means you’re able to generate traffic to your site without being forced to compete with, and spend like a fortune 500 company. Two important aspects to consider when beginning the search for the shiny Golden Nugget Keywords are:
- Do the keywords attract buyers or content consumers? This will help you to understand if the keyword belongs on your website’s product/service offering page or perhaps is better suited to your blog. An example is “Wall Painter” (intent to purchase) vs. “Painting a Wall” (seeking information).
- Ask yourself if your keyword gets enough searches? There is no point in using a keyword that no one is searching! Use AdWords Keyword Planner to show an estimated number of searches for your chosen keyword and to find suggestions for additional keywords that you might not have considered.
5. Is It a Bird? Is It a Plane? No, It’s Hummingbird (Wait, Isn’t That a Bird?)
In 2013 Google quietly introduced Hummingbird, a new algorithm that drove the online community (and some puzzled Ornithologists) into frenzy. The fact that there was no formal documentation caused mild panic and confusion. Laymen looked to the SEO gurus to shed some light…and so they did. What is Hummingbird? Asher Elran the founder of Web Ethics explains: Developers found a way to “smarten” search engines up enough to take a question and look at the context rather than seeing the words within the query as separate entities. Hummingbird will take a search engine query using long-tailed keywords and try to decipher the context of the question rather than chase the specific keywords within the question. The goal is to provide results that actually answer the question. Capala, of SEO Like I’m 5, adds that Hummingbird uses various sources to determine how important a web page/site is. These sources include the Knowledge Graph (synonym engine), search history of users and geo-location data among others. So what’s next? Take steps to gain the search engine’s trust and organise data in a way that’s easy for Google to understand.
6. Making friends with Google
You might be wondering how to gain a search engines trust. Clue- it’s not by bonding with it over strawberry daiquiris or a round of Budlight. It is however, done by thinking holistically about the content you’re generating and optimizing. Creating valuable and shareable content that answers the communities’ questions is the best way to rank favorably on Google’s SERP. Three ways to do this are:
- Optimize content naturally: Help Hummingbird & Google understand what is being written and why it is relevant to the searcher (see point 4-How To Survive the Keyword Jungle).
- Disclose your identity to Google: Create Google accounts, such as Google+, to confirm your identity, maintain credibility and be awarded authority where it is due. The account also allows access to some powerful tools- Google Analytics & Webmaster. These provide valuable intelligence when thinking about content strategy and assessing site optimization
- Do not use SPAM! (See below)
7. SPAMMIN’
Take that black (SEO) hat off please! One sure way to devalue your content and credibility is to “litter” keywords all over your page in the hopes of making it appear more relevant and rank highly on Google. This is called spam. Spam A.K.A keyword stuffing is not looked upon as favorably as turkey stuffing over Thanksgiving and for a good reason! It makes content unhelpful, annoying and overall, creates a negative experience. Search Engines have severe penalties for those that break the rules…imagine the consequences of being banned from Google. Yikes. Key takeaway: do not litter, even on the Internet.
The web is packed with SEO resources. Some are great and easy to grasp, others not-so-great or very technical and should come with a computer science degree needed warning. This SEO for Newbies guide is written as a soft introduction for those venturing into the world of optimizing for search and content marketing. If you enjoyed my post, it would mean a lot if you could hit the recommend button and share it!
For those looking for further resources to make the jump from SEO Newbie to becoming the Webmaster of Your Own Universe, I recommend a fantastic comprehensive resource, SEOMoz.
My hope is that you find this article to be a helpful starting point to continue your SEO journey and that it elicited a chuckle or two…or seven. Thanks for reading! Please feel free to comment, feedback is welcome.
This post is part of Inbound Marketing Clinic, a research project at NYU.
