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SEO Basics Revisited

I recently conducted a table session at an AMA event in Tampa on SEO basics. It’s funny how when you revisit basics sometimes things click in a new way. I didn’t learn anything new in conducting this session other than maybe a way to communicate SEO basics.

I began by explaining how search engines work. I explained that search engines attempt to crawl a website starting on the home page and seek to “find” as much of the website’s content as possible. As marketers our goal is to make it as easy as possible for search engines to find (and index) our content.

When we describe search engine optimization we refer to optimizing the chance that search engines will list our web pages high for our most desired keyword phrases.

I explained Google’s explanation of their search technology which boils down to two factors: 1) PageRank which is an analysis of your website’s link structure (external and internal), 2) Text matching.

Google explains how their patented PageRank technology looks at the complex link structure on the web to determine the extent to which others link to your website and the extent to which your website pages link to each other. BUT, Google also considers the text matching that takes place among all those links.

For example, say you want your website to be found for the keyword phrase “accounting software,” your website would need to have a lot of incoming links from this phrase and a lot of text within the website matching this phrase as well internal links from this phrase. The truth is there are a lot of websites that have text and links for “accounting software.” So, often it’s wise to optimize for more targeted keyword phrases which are less competitive. For example, “project accounting software,” is more specific to a particular type of accounting software and is less competitive. This SEO strategy is known as a long tail keyword strategy.

Sometimes a short tail keyword strategy (accounting software) is realistic but only when the competition factor is not exceedingly high and you have the ability to produce enough of a link structure (both external and internal) to win that SEO strategy.

When we deliver SEO services to our clients we discuss both long tail and short tail strategies to explore the trade offs and the realities of both approaches.

Another factor when considering basic SEO strategies is the URL structure of each web page. Optimizing for a keyword phrase should ideally be done for a web page that contains the search phrase in it, such as ….project-accounting-software.com. Note the keywords are separated by a dash, not an underscore.

The simple rule of thumb in basic SEO strategies is to remember that we want to make it as easy as possible for search engines to find and rank our website content.

Bernie Borges

http://twitter.com/berniebay

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