There is a perception that SEO is complex, and many companies choose to ignore it. But while this perception is somewhat deserved, the basic components of search engine optimization are actually quite simple. Plus, if you ignore SEO, you’re basically turning your back on the largest source of free customers on the web: Google.
A quick test: Do you need to improve your SEO? At the same time, many websites don’t realize they are ignoring SEO or actively making it difficult for Google to discover their content. Here are three quick ways to tell if your SEO needs improvement:
A Google site search for your site yields fewer results than the number of pages your website actually has. Your URLs are full of random symbols and numbers that make no sense to visitors. The page titles on your website do not accurately describe what is written on the page. If any of these are the case, it’s time to spend at least a couple of hours thinking about SEO. No, you won’t displace Yelp, SimplyHired, or TripAdvisor overnight, but you can position yourself to get more traffic from Google. Here are five basic steps to get started.
1. CHOOSE IF YOUR SITE IS “LONG TAIL” OR “HEAD”
It’s important to decide from the beginning whether to focus your SEO attention narrowly or broadly: you probably won’t win at both. “Head” sites aim to rank well for common terms that are searched thousands of times a day, such as “how to get a job.” Long-tail websites, on the other hand, try to rank well in Google search results for specific, rarer searches: the goal is to attract search volumes that, when combined, add up to that of the most common keywords. If you’re a local dentist, you can probably only focus on one or two key phrases (“Manhattan family dentist,” for example). On the other hand, if you are a national directory of dentists, there are thousands of keywords you can target (“emergency dental work in Mobile, Alabama,” for example).
2. ORGANIZE YOUR CONTENT USING BREADCRUMB NAVIGATION
Your goal should be to allow Google to easily access and understand all the pages on your site. Google crawls your pages with “spiders,” and when they arrive at a random page, they try to follow the links on that page to get to other pages. If they can do this easily, Google can more quickly index your entire website and incorporate pages into its search results. A good way to do this is to use breadcrumb navigation, or a “trail” for your content that allows users to quickly see where a page fits in relation to the rest of the site. Once you’ve set up this breadcrumb navigation, configure your URL structure to reflect it exactly: users (and Google) will be even happier.
3. OPTIMIZE YOUR PAGE TITLES
When you do a search on Google, the blue links that appear below the main result are usually the page titles of the website. So, if you have accurate and descriptive page titles, Google will be better able to know whether to present your content to its users. For example, in our pricing guide for used cell phones, the page title is Used Phone Prices | Phone Pricing Guide. Often, you’ll see sites where all the page titles are the same (for example, if we had called each page “Pricing Guide”), and that doesn’t help Google know what the page is about. Google also crawls the text on the page, including headers and subheadings, so you should make sure they reflect the content as well. The key is to include keywords strategically throughout your content, although they should make sense to the user, it looks like an obvious list remember the days of “keyword” dumps at the bottom of the page.
4. CREATE ORIGINAL CONTENT
Google wants to direct its visitors to original primary content, not to republish something that has already been published. So, even in the early days of your site, it’s best to create your own content, rather than syndicate it from other sources. Likewise, be selective about who you allow to republish your content. If Google believes the other source is the primary source and you are the derivative, it will penalize you. On the other hand, if your content is the best (and only) answer to a very specific query, there is a good chance that Google will reward you.
5. GET INCOMING LINKS
Google wants to send users to websites that are considered “authorities” in a subject area. Today, Google calculates this primarily by seeing if trusted sites are linked to you. Google also looks to see what words those websites use when they connect with you to understand what your site is about (this is called “anchor text”). For example, if many sites link to Priceonomics calling us a “pricing guide,” Google will eventually realize that’s what we are. In the future (or perhaps already), Google may also look at social signals such as tweets, Facebook likes, and Google + 1 to calculate authority. So how do you get good incoming links? Well, the key to really ranking for SEO is to produce content so good that other sites on the web can’t help but link to it. There’s a lot more to learn when it comes to SEO, but the best place you can focus your energy is the really hard stuff: creating great original content.
