I’ve talked before about the need to have strategy in addition to tactics when it comes to conversion rate optimization. (Refresher: strategy is your long-term plan for how all the copy on your site interacts, while tactics are the micro-tweaks you make to improve a particular facet of a particular page.) The same applies to search engine optimization as well—you can find tips & tricks for SEO tactics all over the Web, but more than anything, you need to have a clear idea of your strategy.
So, I’d like to first share with you the principles of search engine optimization—the theory that explains why we do what we do—and then talk about how we derive a strategy from that. From there, you’ll be ready to employ any of a million tactics that will support your strategy.
Note: I’m going to use “search engine” interchangeably with “Google.” For 95% of companies, there may as well only be one search engine. Plus, even if you want to work hard to improve in a non-Google search engine, the principles will be the same.
Principles of SEO: How search engines think, and what you can do with that knowledge
Modern search engines use a huge number of heuristics (decision-making rules) to decide what pages to show you for a particular query.
One of the most basic heuristics is this: Does the page have the same text that the user typed as the query? Of course, for many queries, there may 100,000 pages or more for which that is true, so we need to narrow things down some more. One way to do it is to count the number of times the query occurs: if a page uses the query 10 times (without coming off as spammy due to “keyword stuffing”), that query is probably more central to its topic than a page that only uses it once.
But keywords alone don’t tell us everything about the quality of a page.
This is where Google’s PageRank algorithm comes in. PageRank is like a voting system, where Web sites cast “votes” to indicate that other pages are valuable. Not all votes are the same, though—votes from highly influential sites (like the New York Times site, for instance) are more heavily weighted than votes from sites you’ve never heard of. So, when a writer from the New York Times writes an article about a sake lounge and links to the SakaMai Web site, you can bet Google pays attention and says “SakaMai’s site is a really good match for queries dealing with sake lounges.” SakaMai will thus be shown higher in the relevant search results compared to a no-name sake lounge.
Another major factor Google considers is domain authority. If a Web site (a single “domain”) contains a lot of great content, it will have a higher authority than a site with, say, only one really great page. The higher your domain authority, the more the search engines will implicitly trust you. That means that, all else being equal, a brand new page created on a site with high authority will do better in the search engines than one with low authority.
Of course, there are tons of other things Google considers, but you can safely ignore them for now—understanding the basics will also allow you to understand all the modifications they’ve put in place, if or when the time comes that those distinctions matter to you.
[To learn more about the nitty-gritty details, see Google’s awesome interactive storyboard-style page “
.” Or, if you want the technical explanation, see Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s paper on PageRank, titled “
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
.”]
What this means for you
So, the ideal page to show a user with a particular query will be one which:
- Contains the text of the query more than once,
- Is linked to by many other pages using text related to the query, and
- Lives on a very “trusted” domain (one which is linked to by many influential sources).
When you’re working on the “O” in “SEO,” then, you’re generally trying to improve one of these three things.
Writing a page custom-tailored to match a particular query is easy, so it’s easy to understand the applications of 1). (Just be sure that your content is actually rich and authoritative—search engines have gotten to be very good at sniffing out thin, crummy content and devaluing it accordingly.) For a discussion of how to choose and target queries that you might create content for, first learn about what the long tail of search is (and why you should care). Then, you can read about how to go about creating that content.
To apply 2) and 3), you’ll be doing “link building”—basically, convincing other (preferably influential) sites to talk about and link to your content. This can take a million forms, but at the end of the day, it’s about exchanging value—you create something that benefits someone or some organization, and you ask them to share it with their own visitors by linking to it.
[For a nitty-gritty discussion of best practices for link building, check out
with Neil Patel, one of my favorite folks in SEO today. Probably more useful to you than those nitty-gritty details are Neil’s blog posts on link building tactics, like
.]
Formulating an SEO strategy
At this point, you understand the basics of what SEO is about: improving your content to better match what people search for, and getting more (and more influential) sites to link to you.
Let’s talk about developing a long-term strategy to do these things on your site.
Build & improve your content
Today, any SEO strategy needs to focus on the long tail—the uncommon queries that make up roughly 70% of all search volume. You need a strategy in place for creating content that attracts the long tail, which means either outsourcing (hiring outside help to create the content in a scalable manner) or insourcing (getting your team on-board to regularly create new content without burning out).
You also need a strategy for so-called “on-page” SEO. This is where that keyword count comes in. Remember that a page that matches the query multiple times will rank better than a page that only matches it once (all else being equal). Therefore, you need to both edit your existing pages (or blog posts, articles, etc.) and put in place a strategy for future pages that will:
- Consciously target particular queries, and
- Focus on using those keywords and closely related ones on the page.
Again, the primary target for any content is the reader, so your inclusion of keywords should never make the page sound anything less than professional. However, within those bounds, you’ll find you have a lot of room to improve. The WPBeginner blog, for instance, increased their organic search traffic by 20% in less than 2 months largely by editing existing posts to better target certain keywords.
Build your link portfolio
Next, you need to put in place a plan for link building. The actual methods you employ are not as important as having a plan that you follow through with. Take the principle of exchanging value and create things that people in your market will appreciate. Share these with high-profile media sources in your industry and ask them to share it with their constituency. Be sure to also promote your content on your own site—your own visitors are the most likely to find value in what you create, and their posts on their own Web sites can be extremely valuable.
Take full advantage of what you’ve got
Your strategy has one more crucial component: you need to take advantage of all the opportunities Google gives you for improving your search results. This includes signing up for Google Webmaster Tools to get reports on your search health, but it also includes things like authorship information (which gets your headshots in the search results) and product markup (which gets things like star ratings from reviews and pricing information in the results). While this won’t cause you to rank higher per se, it will substantially increase the rate at which people click your links when they do show up. In my work on X-Plane.com, we leveraged these features to net a 12% gain in traffic from search engines—for just a couple hours of engineering work!
If you’re smart and systematic about how you attend to all 3 components of your strategy, you’ll find that your SEO campaigns do way better than people who are all about tactics. Those people bounce from project to project like a hyperactive squirrel each time they hear about a new SEO tactic. By having a plan in place, though, you’ll be able to follow through and get real results.
Where to go from here
Having developed your SEO strategy, you can start optimizing your site and your collection of links.
If you don’t know where to start, I recommend hitting an SEO blog like SEOmoz, Neil Patel’s QuickSprout, or Patrick McKenzie’s Kalzumeus. Of course, I post SEO tactics from time to time too in the SEO category. Beware that on the big-name blogs, you’ll find ten posts that are completely useless to you for every one that’s a money-maker. Just skip anything that doesn’t fit with your strategy!
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