SEO

No, it’s not a secret government agency, a corporate job title, or the latest muscle car from Ford.

It’s an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. What does that mean? It means “Getting Google to love you”. And Yahoo!, and MSN, and all the rest of the search engines. It’s a catch-phrase for “getting higher on the list”.

Search engines are a way of life on the internet. People rely on search engines to point them in the right direction when looking for information online. Getting to the top of the list is important. The higher you are on the list, the more likely that people will click on the link that brings them to your site.

Importance means money. And money means scammers. There are hundreds of people and companies out there who will tell you that they can “make you #1 on Google”–for a fee, of course. In my personal experience, I’ve seen some rather significant disparity in this fee. I’ve had one company tell me that they could do it for a mere $10,000 plus $300/year. I’ve had a client tell me that another company promised the same for $65/year.

SEO firms will throw a lot of catch-phrases at you. They’ll tell you all about their perfect plan for making you number one. Don’t trust them. There are no magic tricks to make you #1 in the search engine results. The “get rich quick” kinds of tactics are known as “black hat techniques”, and the search engine companies know all about them. Try using them, and you’ll get caught. Then you’ll be banished from their index. That means you won’t show up on any searches.

Honest SEO is based on 2 primary concepts: link-backs and content. The search engine companies are constantly tweak their programs to make them better understand what’s on your website and how real people view it. This is the key: build your site to be interesting to real people, and it will become interesting to the search engines.

Back-links

A “back-link” is when another website includes a link to yours. Sites can link to you for a number of reasons: reviews (”This widget from XYZ, Inc. is really useful.”), referrals (”hey, check out this great article”), forum signatures, web ads, and many other sources. Every time a webpage has a link that points to your site, it makes the search engines pay attention to you. The closer the topic of the the other site is to yours, the more attention the SEs pay to you. If your site is about blue widgets, the best links you can get are from sites that are talking about widgets.

Talk to your supplier or retailers. Offer a link-exchange: you put a link to them on your site, and they put a link to you on theirs. Purchase web-ads on related sites. If you’re active in online forums, put a link to your site in your signature line. Almost anywhere you can get a link pointing to your site is good.

Almost. The exception are “link farms”. These are sites which offer to give you a link in exchange for money. These are different from ads that link to your site; these are sites that do nothing except list links. The SEs know who these sites are, and they know what they’re doing. Those links won’t do you any good.

Content

“Content is king”. That’s a very popular saying among those who create and maintain websites. And they’re right. Content is king. Your website is an extension of your business. It needs to speak to your customers and tell them what they want and need to hear. The more friendly and informative your website is, the more people will like it. And the search engines like what people like.

Don’t write your site to make Google happy. Write your site to make you customers happy. Google isn’t buying your product. You know who your customers are. You know what they want to know. Use your site to give them that information.

And don’t just do it once: keep giving them new information. The more you update your site–the more you add new and timely information–the more your readers will come back. AND… the more that the search engines will pay attention to you.

If you’ve been set up with a site that uses WordPress as the CMS (which many of our customers have), you have a great tool at your disposal: the blog post. You can write a new post every week (or every day!) to let your customers know what’s going on with your business. Keep your readers coming back. Remember: your website isn’t just a big newspaper ad, it’s a powerful and interactive tool that you can use to entice and educate your readers. Don’t just say “all widgets 50% off this week”. Share your knowledge with them. Tell them about the history of widgets. Explain the difference between widgets and do-dads. Educate them on how to tell a good widget from a cheap one. Teach them the “7 qualities of a superior widget”.

In other words, write information that is interesting. That interesting information will not only keep your readers coming back, but it will remain on your site forever, so that other people can find it. Suddenly, you may find that the Widget-Fancier’s Club of America is looking to you for information–and buying from you because you obviously know what you’re talking about. And if those people like your articles, they’ll link to them on their sites. They’ll tell their friends about you. Those friends will link to you on their sites…. and so on.

Content is king. Give people something interesting and informative to read, and they will bring business to your door.

This post is getting long, and I want to save some of my information for another post or two (See what I’m doing? I’m giving you some information, and then giving you a reason to come back later to get more!).

In future articles, I’ll talk about some of the tools you can utilize to help you make your site more search engine friendly (and people friendly). I hope to see you then. And, as always, if you have any questions about your site and how to improve it, just ask. If I don’t know the answer, I can at least try to point you in the right direction. All of us at Geek Niche want you to be incredibly successful with your websites. After all… if you get really popular, you’ll need to upgrade your account, and that means more profits for us! (Hey… at least we’re honest!)

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M Blaze Miskulin
Old Man on the Mountain
Geek Niche, Inc.