Google SEO Marketing
A Definitive Guide to How It’s Done
It seems a vast amount of people, never even attempt to do any sort of SEO work. If questioned, the usual response is “it’s just to hard”.
The truth is, to many people believe SEO is hard. The reason SEO is hard, is because there are very few straight to the point, step by step guides for SEO.
The problem with a step by step guide, is to many people would use it, everyone would be trying the same methods, and overall they would fight for keywords and need something “more” than everyone else.
This is the truth behind the complication of SEO. However because there are not a lot of guides and because there are so many people that just never bother to figure out it, ranking in Google is actually a lot easier than people think.
That’s what this article is all about — teaching you just how easy SEO can be!
Before we can really begin getting into Google SEO however, there are some terms to go over.
What are Google Keywords
The following definition was taken from the Google adwords support website. This seems like a very fitting description of what keywords are.
“keywords are what connect your ads to what people are searching for.”
What that means is that it is the word, words, or phrase used to link to your content.
A simple example of that is when I write articles, frequently if I use the words Marketers Cooperative. I turn them into a link back to the marketers cooperative website.
This, turns the words “marketers cooperative” into a Google keyword. Google picks up the words used to link to a website, and ranks the website based on those words.
The more a specific keyword is used, the more weight that keyword will have in Google. That is to say, Google combines and counts all the keywords to your website, and ranks them against other sites using the same keywords.
The site that gets the most keywords linking in — is ranked highest.
What are Google Search Terms
A Google search term is nothing more or less than the words typed into the search engine to locate a website.
Keywords and search terms — despite similarities are actually completely different things
Search terms, are actually terms found within the content of a webpage and although they are completely different from keywords, they work directly off of them.
The easiest way to explain this is with an example.
Imagine if you will that you owned a website for a landscaping business. You go out all over the entire internet and create links to your website using the terms “lawn mowing services”, “gardening services” and “yard cleanup services”.
That’s all well and fine, but that’s only three keywords to your site. So you need to compliment keywords with search terms. To do that, the pages of your site, need to use words that would otherwise be logical for the topic.
So as the owner of such a website you want to create articles and/or pages to help further your search ranks. So you may want an article about how to keep weeds out of the garden.
Within creating such an article lets say you use the following statement:
To keep weeds out of my garden, and how I keep weeds out of my clients garden is the manual removal method of pulling them out by the roots.
Now understanding this is a little tricky. First you have to realize Google has already ranked you under the keywords “garden services”. So they already recognize you as an authority in these things.
For that reason when people search Google, Google can now safely assume if they are searching for things relating to gardening, your site is relevant and as such, they can return specific search terms found within your pages.
For example if someone searches “How do I remove weeds from my garden” Google says, okay this is a gardening topic, so first lets sort all sites based on gardening.
Then lets scan those sites for “remove weeds from my garden” and we can see from your sentence the words “weeds”, “garden”, and “removal” within one of your pages.
This, in its most simplistic of explanations, is how Google ranks websites and figures out how to display content to searchers.
Understanding this, is of utmost importance before any other methods of SEO are ever looked at. After you understand how Google actually ranks, there are many things you can do to further help Google figure out the correct search terms to rank you form.
Onsite Google SEO Techniques
Basic onsite Google SEO
There really isn’t a lot to onsite SEO, but because most people are not web developers they think this is a complex topic.
The thing to realize, is Google is not a human — it’s a machine and as such it actually can’t see your website. So imagine if the only thing you had to evaluate a website by, was the source code of the website.
If that was the case, it might like something like the way Google does things.
- Domain Names
First, we start by looking at the domain name of the website. Does the domain name relate to the subject matter or is it totally unrelated. Having a name that uses search engine keywords is one of the best things you can do for SEO. - Page Names
Not only does the domain name matter, but the page name itself is equally as important. You don’t want a page named asdfghj.php when your page is about selling lipstick. Rather you want a page name targeting the same search keyword as you want to target for — in this case lipstick.php. - Title Tags
After you understand that the url’s themselves are important, next you need to focus on the title tag of the page. The title tag should use the same keyword as you are targeting, but not be the exact keyword. This is because you don’t want your page coming across as trying to cheat. Instead a title like “how to apply lipstick” would be more fitting. It still uses the word lipstick, but also a few descriptor words with it. - Header Tags
If your website uses a text link header, you want to ensure that all pages start with an h2 tag. If your website uses an image for a header, you want to make sure all pages start with an h1 tag. The start of your page should be the same as you put in the title tag for the page. You should then wring a couple paragraphs, and use a sub header, which would either be h2 or h3. You want to use several sub header tags on a page. Each subheader should use the main keyword of the page within it. An example subheader would be as follows
How not to smear lipstick when applying
Advanced Onsite Google SEO
The advanced methods are really not all that special. In fact, they are fairly simple. Perhaps more simpe than the basic methods of onsite seo.
As we said in the beginning its all about understanding Google that can’t see pages they can only see code. So you want to make sure to format your code as much as you can.
Use bold text on search terms and keywords (don’t over do it). Use italics in the same way. Use lists and block quotes for formatting. The idea is, the more you format, the more favorably Google looks upon the page.
Google got smart
The above rules, are nothing new to Google SEO. They have pretty much been the same rules since the beginning of Google. So how come we hear so much about how hard google is to use?
Well once upon a time, blackhat SEO marketers started to realize how easy it was to do SEO and they started manipulating the system. They created tools to mass spam links and skew Google counting and ranking in their favor.
Google eventually caught on. Google started attacking the very methods these people were using, by blacklisting websites that were well known to be used in cheating the system.
Still the blackhat SEO didn’t stop. In fact its been a never ending battle back and forth between Google and black hat marketers.
At one point, black hat marketers tried using blogs to allow users to submit their article content across an array of other blogs. Google eventually caught on to this also and created duplicate content penalties.
Its only been recently that Google has finally gotten the upper hand on things, and even still there are many black hat marketers that just keep changing their methods trying to cheat the system.
White Hat Marketing is Organic Marketing
When Google started combating blackat marketing one of the first things they did in determining what wold be considered spam links and what wouldn’t, was to evaluate it based on the content surrounding it.
What that means is that if you were running a toy store website yet you were getting links from websites about raising fish, such links would not be counted and in fact could be used against you when marketing.
Article marketing became the answer to that. People started submitting articles all over the internet so that the topic of the article, was relevant to the links it contained.
Although Google has consistently stopped duplicate content, which is effectively submitting the same article to multiple sites and although they have consistently stop article spinning, which is the practice of replacing words in articles with other words that mean the same thing in an attempt to trick google into not seeing it as duplicate content, Google still has allowed the practice of article writing to share links. In fact its considered one of the most “organic” (natural) methods of building links.
The complete SEO picture
So SEO is really the practice of creating large audiences, generating well written articles and sharing it with those audiences, and doing this on as many sites as you can.
The more sites you join and create content on, the more links back to your website you will have.
So for example, I frequently create articles here on medium, on linkedin, on apsense, and I frequently ask and answer questions on Quora.
I take these articles and comments and questions, and I share them on google+, facebook, twitter, and all the other networks. I just cross promote various content back and forth.
Occasionally I look for more networks to add to my list and share my content even further. The bigger the audience, the larger the content reach and the more content I end up creating, which leads to more links which leads to higher rankings.
Advanced SEO Techniques
Lets face it, if you attempt to do what I said above, its going to take you ages and ages. No one has the time to produce thousands and thousands of pieces of content each day to try to rank.
That, is part of the logic behind google. You should be focusing on marketing other than SEO and allow yourself to naturally rank over time. This is why so many people turn to blackhat marketing. Because we don’t have years to sit back building businesses.
What if you don’t have to cheat though? What if there is a method of getting thousands of articles on the internet about topics you want, including your links, and other people are willing to write them?
That is one of the free services we created with OSMP. It is called an Article Exchange.
The concept of our article exchange is very simple. Marketers earn credits typing up articles for other members, and they can spend those credits to get others to write articles for them.
The beauty of this system, is there are no limits as to where one can publish an article. It could be a social network, a blog, a writing platform, a news site, or anywhere else so long as the article is public.
Each person who requests an article picks the title of the article, the link and link keyword, and three sentences that must be included the article.
The writer then must create the article and hand type it — a minimum of 50 words, using all the information from the requester.
Honestly the video explains it best so please do give that a watch.
To download a copy of OSMP please join the Marketers Cooperative website.
If you would like to be part of the OSMP project, please do join both ADSactly and the Marketers Cooperative and reach out to both teams. We jointly created this script and are planning a repository for development in the near future but for now the easiest way to get involved is join both sites, learn what we are both doing, and ask us how you can help both sites jointly with this project.
