Don’t know what SEO is? Well, you’d better find out! It’s a very important part of online marketing. The bottom line is this: if you want your website to be found, you’ve got to pay attention to SEO.
So let’s talk about what it is, and how it works.
SEO Basics
Definition
SEO stands for search engine optimization. What it means: making sure your website is written and structured according to the guidelines of search engines such as Google.
Why? Because when someone uses a search engine to search for a topic, that engine wants to make sure it lists the most relevant sites on the search results page. In order to do that, it has to evaluate thousands of websites and decide which ones go at the top of the list. Those decisions are influenced by a series of rules/guidelines created by the search engine company. The company uses those rules to rate each website.
Here’s an example. Perhaps the search engine has an “amount of content” rule that rates websites based on how much content they have. A website with less than 500 words of content might get 1/10 for “amount of content”, but one with 10,000 words might get 8/10. The idea behind such a rule is that a website with more content is probably more helpful, so it gets rated higher.
Another rule might be that each page on a website has a descriptive title that actually reflects the content on that page. So a page about tennis rules that has the title “tennis rules” would rank higher than a page with the same content but a title of “tennis42-b”. Similarly, a page titled “tennis rules” that only has information about the types of tennis racquets the company sells would rank lower.
All search engines have such rules, but people pay the most attention to Google, since it has the largest market share.
Black hat and white hat techniques
As you can imagine, people who want their websites to appear high in the search results might try to scam some of the rules. For example, they might create dozens of pages on their site with gobble-de-gook information, just to get a higher rating on an “amount of content” rule.
But Google is smarter than that. In fact, if it appears that you are trying to scam any of their rules, they will actually reduce your ratings, or even kick you off any Google results at all.
Anything that is done to try and scam a rule (trying to trick Google into giving you a higher rating than you actually deserve) is called a black-hat technique, or black-hat SEO. On the other hand, anything that is done in ways that are acceptable to Google are called white-hat techniques.
So you want to use white-hat techniques and avoid ever using black-hat ones.
White-hat techniques
Before we get into white-hat details, I want to explain a very important principle that Google espouses.
All of its ranking rules are meant to rate how helpful/relevant a website might be to a searcher. That’s because Google’s goal is to list search results that are actually what the searcher wanted when they typed in their search terms.
For example, if someone searches for “how to play tennis”, Google wants the results page to list websites that actually teach/show you how to play tennis. So it looks for pages that have pages with relevant titles (maybe “basic tennis rules”, or “how to play tennis like a pro”). In addition, it looks at the text on individual pages to make sure they really are about how to play tennis. So it will look for the types of words or phrases (keywords) that should appear on a page. So it might look for keywords such as “game”, “set”, “match”, “tennis rules”, “tennis racquet”, “racquet grip”, etc.
So, if you pay attention to creating a good, professional, helpful site, then, theoretically, that’s all you need to do, since Google’s rules are based on: what constitutes a good, professional, helpful site.
So Google’s principle is this:
Don’t concentrate on SEO rules. Instead, focus on creating a good experience for your visitors.
This is important, and too few people understand this, or accept it. But Google is CONSTANTLY changing its rules so they better and better match what makes a good website.
So if you are making a good website to begin with, you are probably ticking off a lot of Google’s SEO boxes.
Does that mean you should ignore SEO? NO. There are some very good reasons to learn about it.
- It helps you learn about what truly makes a good website. And that is helpful to your customers, and to your bottom line.
- There are some SEO rules that are not so obvious. These are typically behind-the-scenes settings on your website.
- It can be a good checklist to use to make sure you’ve included/done everything the way you really should be doing it in the first place.
So that’s my overview of SEO. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll get into some specific SEO details so you can really understand what it’s all about.
