SEO 101 – The 3 Main Criteria

Many people have heard about search engine optimization or SEO and heard how it works but there are three things that you should keep in your mind at all times – content, relevancy and competition.

Content is King in SEO

We know you know this and have heard of this. Basically you need to have content (those are written words (paragraphs) on each page within your website.  This is helpful to the consumer as it explains the story about that page, gives the basic details that they may see within the pictures or products on your site and gives the search engines that same information since they can’t “see” the pictures.  One other thing to note would be to have the right keyword density.

What does density have to do with anything? As you know, having keywords on your site is important to help the search engines drive traffic based on the phrases they enter into the search engines.  However, you don’t want to just put a list of all of your keywords.  While this may seem easier, it appears spammy (yes, that is a word) or looks like keyword stuffing.

Google will penalize those who use this tactic so a good rule of thumb would be to include keywords within the content of each page in a way that seems natural and a good fit for the page.  It helps to use other variations of your keywords, parts of or even synonyms for those keywords as search engines look and analyze the whole page – keywords and content, as noted in a discussion on rankings in 2012.

Bottom line – keep it real, use keyword-rich content that sounds natural so it makes sense to the consumer, who is ultimately who you are selling to, but in a manner that helps the search engines.

Relevancy in SEO, huh?

Relevancy is basically defined as having the ability to satisfy a need of the user, but how does relevance apply to search engine optimization?  For example, a person types in the search engine query “car repair,” and up comes the search engine results. The user clicks a link, and lands on a car dealership service page. This would be relevant to the search because they ended on the right page.

However, if the link took them to the sales page, it isn’t as relevant and the user will have to work to find the service page. You don’t want to have to work for your answers; you are doing that by typing in the appropriate queries in the search engine. You don’t want to have to search the website, too, right?

What if, in that same scenario, that dealership didn’t have a service department? How did their website come up for that search?

The content on the page is about cars, because it is a car dealership, but maybe within the content repair information was included. The search engine made that guess and likely it won’t happen again – especially if you (and other users) abandon that page. The search engines are going to “learn” that this website is not a good return for that term.

So be sure that you have keyword-rich content and that the keywords on your site are relevant to the products and services you provide. Additionally, make sure your meta tags – those are the behind the scenes ‘tags’ such as the title tag, description tag and keyword tags that help with Seo –are relevant to the pages in order to get more accurate results for search queries for the consumers.

Competition, the winner’s on top

Competition isn’t just about your competitors; it’s also about how popular your page is, how often your site is talked about, linked to or clicked on.  So, the more popular your website, the more competitive it is.

The search engines will take your site’s popularity into consideration when they decide which sites to provide in search results. If you have a decent amount of quality inbound links, (Inbound links are just that, links that are coming from another quality site and landing on yours. The more prestigious the better and poor quality links can cause you more damage that help.) you are drumming up talk on your social media, people are talking about your blogs, your site is getting good traffic and the like, these count in the competition “score” also.

So, the bottom line: Promote your site on other sites, on social media, paid advertising and within forums. Create blogs like this one and promote it on social media and get people interested in what you have to offer in hopes that they will talk about your products, service or site more.

Should you have any questions about your relevancy, your competition or content on your site, please contact me, reach out and ask your questions as I would love to help. Thanks for stopping by!

~Kristen

Kristen Day

CEO/Founder of A Visual Business

Kristen is a small business owner and thus dedicated to other small business owners by helping them improve their online presence with search engine optimization, social media marketing, email marketing and pay per click advertising all of which are necessary 'evils' in the digital marketing sphere but enables small business owners the opportunity to compete with larger companies. When not in the digital arena, you can find her riding her Honda VTX1300 or drinking a margarita.