SEO Primer

Let’s start this SEO primer with a bold affirmation: despite what you might have heard from the so-called specialists, SEO isn’t a complicated process. In fact, all you need to do in order to be successful is to follow the simple blueprint below.

SEO Primer Methodology

a) Find the proper keywords to target. Most people (including many established SEO companies) make the mistake of targeting the wrong keywords, search phrases that are either too difficult to rank in a decent amount of time (3…6 months) or don’t have a good commercial value. Let’s take a company that sells car insurance packages for example; getting a good Google rank for “insurance” is not only hard, but when (and if) you have finally crawled into the top 10, you will discover that many of your website visitors are actually interested in buying insurance for their homes, lives or maybe they’re just students looking for insurance-related information in order to do their homework.

In this case, getting a good rank for “online car insurance” and / or “cheap car insurance” is definitely a much better idea; these keywords will be easier to rank and they will send highly targeted, buyer visitors to your website. Make sure to spend a lot of time for this step, using an experienced SEO consultant to create a good list with the keywords that will be targeted; otherwise, you will not see a significant return on your SEO investment.

b) Optimize your website, creating pages with good content. Offer valuable information, not rehashed material or (even worse) text that is copied from somebody else’s website, blog posts, articles, etc. The search engines simply love pages with consistent, unique content. This stage of the process is called on-page SEO.

c) Promote your website, getting as many quality backlinks as possible; a backlink is a link posted on somebody else’s website which leads to your website. The backlink should ideally have a good “anchor text”, a text that describes what your website is about. As an example, instead of having a link to my website that says “click here”, I would rather have a link that says ethical seo company if I plan to get a good rank for the “ethical seo company” search phrase. This is called off-page SEO and is by far the most important (and time-consuming) part of the SEO process, being responsible for about 90% of its success. While finding the proper keywords to target and optimizing the web pages is a one-time operation, building backlinks to your website must be an ongoing process, especially if the industry you’re in is profitable. Most (or all) of the companies on the 1st Google page invest in SEO on a monthly basis; othewise, they wouldn’t get these good ranks and sales.

SEO Primer Backlinking Tips

So how do we get other people to link to our site? As you might imagine, this isn’t an easy task; if you sell shoes, I wouldn’t imagine why anyone would want to link to your website, unless you have invented a unique pair of rocket-based shoes that make going to work a snap, you are giving away a very precious “best shoes for weddings” guide, etc. And trust me on this: even if you did that, you wouldn’t get too many backlinks, not to mention that you wouldn’t have control over anchor text: a guy would use “click here” to link to your website, another one would use “check this out!”, another one might use “nice online shoe store”, and so on – search keywords that you aren’t probably interested in because they’re either useless or they have a very low monthly search volume (your potential clients aren’t typing them in the search engines).

Getting inbound links (backlinks that point to our website) which contain proper anchor text (the keywords we’re interested in) is an art in itself; fortunately, there are several 100% ethical (also called white hat)  methods that allow us to get them. If you have written a good piece of content, for example an interesting article, you can submit it to thousands of article directories and format it in such a way that you will get the desired backlink with proper anchor text. Sure, many article directories will reject your submission, but if your article is really good and you are submitting it to thousands of directories, you will definitely get not only a few hundreds of backlinks to your website, but also traffic (website visitors) from the tens of millions of people that are visiting the article directories each and every day.

This is just one of the 100% ethical SEO methods that are included in our Rank Mover package; when they are combined with social bookmarking, press releases, directory submissions, and so on they’ll definitely improve your rank in the search engines. Our SEO primer must end somewhere, so we’ll end it here, but we’ll continue to discuss other 100% ethical, white hat SEO methods in the future articles.

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