How to Find the Best SEO for Your Content
Search engine optimization (SEO) is more art than science. There are lots of ways to optimize your online content in hopes of attracting the attention of search engines--and viewers. There are also plenty of SEO experts offering detailed--and sometimes contradictory--advice about the best approach to getting your content to stand out in the crowd. Decide for yourself what set of SEO techniques are best for you. Begin by becoming familiar with the various options.
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Understand the basics of SEO. Search engines like Google.com, Bing.com and Yahoo.com constantly "crawl" the Web with specialized search programs known as spiders or bots. These seek out new and popular links, read through the content on the site, and build massive indexes that store information about each webpage they visit.
Search engines use complex, secret algorithms to evaluate each site, gauging parameters like the number of visitors to a page, the type and quality of other sites linking to a page, the nature of the content (e.g., text, videos, or music files) and so on.
People care (sometimes deeply) about these secret algorithms, since they determine a site's overall ranking (or PageRank, as Google likes to call it). Higher rankings, in turn, mean greater prominence in search results (your site gets listed first or second, rather than 50th or 500th). Greater prominence means many more visitors to your webpage or blog, and if the site is monetized with ads and affiliate links, then you're likely to earn more money.
SEO techniques try to take advantage of how spiders work, and the way they rank pages, to optimize a site and achieve a higher ranking. But since the actual working of the spiders is a closely guarded secret, an awful lot of SEO technique is educated guess work. Not surprisingly, different SEO "experts" make different guesses as to what factors are most important, and what tricks of the trade are best for optimizing a site. This has given rise to different styles of SEO. The one that is best for you depends largely on your personal style of creating and managing your content.
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Check out keyword tools. Keywords are the actual words and phrases that people type into search engines when they are looking for information on the Web.
A keyword can be a simple term, like "laptops," a coherent question, such as, "What is the cheapest laptop for college?" or a hodgepodge of words: "laptop cheap best in school".
Many SEO experts go to extraordinary lengths to study keywords, gauge their performance, and use different combinations of terms in the content they create. This is because different keywords have different values to advertisers. An advertiser for a high-priced item or service--like laptops, mortgages or divorce lawyers--is generally willing to bid more for advertising keywords than an advertiser of a low-priced item, like ringtones.
Keyword-focused SEO tries to find the best combination of keywords that have a high payout, but relatively little competition on the Web. It's a delicate dance, and one that is a constantly moving target, since keyword popularity and bid prices change on a daily basis.
Google's advertising programs (AdSense and AdWords) provide excellent keyword tools that provide a wealth of information on how popular a keyword or key phrase may be, along with the current bids for the terms. The tool will also suggest related keywords that you can work into your content. You can find this tool in the Resources section.
There are also subscription keyword services, such as Wordtracker.com. They also offer a free suggestion tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
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Be aware (and wary) of "black hat techniques," unethical attempts to boost optimization rankings. Search engines are basically looking for high-quality content, and some SEO gurus try to fool spiders into "thinking" a site is high-quality by giving them what they're looking for--lots of keywords and backlinks. An entire industry of keyword-stuffing and link-farms have come into being to try to make websites more desirable to search engines, even if the content of the site is nothing to write home about or even a big pile of gibberish.
These so-called "black hat SEO" techniques aren't particularly noble. But they do seem to work for some people on a short-term basis. Over the longer term, however, search engines learn to recognize them, and then penalize the sites that use them by lowering their ranking.
If you engage the services of an SEO firm, or are thinking of trying some new SEO techniques yourself, be cautious about making use of anything that looks black hat or spammy.
It's generally better to stick with "white hat" SEO, the type of techniques described in the following steps. Also be sure to review Google's Guide to SEO (linked in Resources) for an authoritative description of the dos and don'ts of SEO.
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Let quality be your guide. Since search engines are trying their hardest to find high-quality content, try to give them what they're after. A very legitimate SEO technique is simply to concentrate on producing good quality material, and letting the rest take care of itself.
The lesson of black hat SEO is instructive: It may work for a while, but it can totally undermine your visibility over the long term. As the search engines learn to distinguish SEO tricks from genuine quality, the poorer quality sites inevitably fall to the bottom of the search results page.
Since you likely want your content to be highly viewed, and even earning money for you, over the long term, it pays to take the long view and focus on quality materials. That way, a year or five years after it's published, your content will still be ranking well, no matter how search engines adjust their algorithms in the future.
A comprehensive article on SEO for the long term is in the Resources section.
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Remember the simple things. No matter what approach you take to SEO--white hat, black hat or high-quality--there are still some simple steps to keep in mind to help the search engines do their job:
Use synonyms. If you're writing about lawyers, use the term "attorneys" every now and then. If you're addressing an international crowd, you may even want to toss in "barristers" or "counselors". Keep it in a natural voice.
Don't overlook file names. If you're posting images or other non-text content, you can name your file "img005.jpg" if you want, but that name doesn't tell the search engines very much about what the image is about. A file name like "lawyer-in-court.jpg" is much more likely to be found in an image search. Similarly, keep your file tags and titles descriptive.
Titles count. Search engines do seem to give a lot of weight to the title of a page, and that's something that's not likely to change down the road. So keep your titles nicely descriptive as well, and help those spiders out.
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Resources
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