You’re wasting your money on SEO and what you can do about it, Part 3
Search Engine Optimization
Before moving on from part 2, link building, we should highlight what an search engine optimization specialist should do to aid link building.
Identify Potential Sites: By researching, an SEO will be able to find who, what and where your competition gets links. Also, an SEO will be able to find niche sites, communities, forums and blogs in which you can participate and add your link.
Craft Emails: SEOs can help you compose emails to other sites, pitching your page for link consideration. For example, once an SEO identifies what sites link to your competitors, you should contact the site and suggest they link to you instead.
Sharing Strategy: An SEO can tell you where (Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc) you should share your page, who should share it and how often.
Measuring Results: an SEO will be able to tell you how particular links affect your goals, giving you insights on types of links you should peruse.
OK. So now on to the next part of our series. The next subtopic of Search Engine Marketing is Search Engine Optimization.
Search Engine Optimization
Yes, sometimes, as we said, SEO becomes synonymous with Search Engine Marketing, but it’s actually a subset that covers the following areas.
Search Engine Optimization Audit
Before you can even begin doing Keyword Research, you need to find out where you currently stand.
Do you rank for any existing Keywords?
How well is your site structured?
How do you stand against your competition?
You can do this all manually, but it’s a laborious task. An SEO should have tools that will be able to produce an audit with this information and more, including basic suggestions for improvement.
Keyword Research
Before any search engine optimization can occur, you must know what Keywords you’ll be optimizing your site for.
Remember, you will be optimizing pages for Keywords. Generally one or two per page, so you need quite a few Keywords to sustain you.
No two pages should be optimized for the same keyword.
An SEO will be able to help you brainstorm an initial list of Keywords – generally about 50-100.
From there, an SEO will be able to conduct research on the list to rank which Keywords you should be pursuing.
On-site Search Engine Optimization
Google and other search engines don’t see your site like humans.
Search engines see the code that produces the visual and structural aspects of your site.
If this code is not optimized, search engines won’t be able to understand what your pages are about, and thus, won’t get indexed for your Keywords.
Load time is another important aspect of on-site search engine optimization.
If your pages load slowly, chances are, Google won’t rank them as highly as it would if they loaded quicker.
Subheadings and bolded words also signal to Google what your pages are about. Your Keywords should appear in your subheadings.
Additionally, your pages should have a keyword density around two to four percent.
Finally, your site will need a robots.txt file and an XML site map to direct search engines, telling them what to index and what pages are the most important.
We touched on all the specifics of these areas in previous blog posts and some of it might not make any sense at all.
But, an SEO should be able to explain all of this to you in the context of your specific site. Additionally, an SEO will be able to test your site to measure how your site stands up in this area and make recommendations on how to improve the weaker areas.
Content Strategy
Finally, you’re ready for a content strategy.
A content strategy will direct you as to what type of content you’ll be producing (video, audio, photos, articles, polls, question/answer, etc) on what Keywords, when and how often.
A lot of this will depend on what Keywords you chose and how many resources you to dedicate to your content strategy.
An SEO will develop this strategy based on those variables.
We recommend our clients take control of their content strategy, but until the client is comfortable operating and executing the strategy, an SEO will be able to do so.
And that’s part 3. If you have any questions, please drop it in the comments below.
Next time, we’ll wrap up this series with a look at the last subtopic of Search Engine Marketing: Analytics.
About Cody Swann
Cody Swann is an entrepreneur, developer, strategist, banged up ex-football walk-on, retired body builder and former journalist born and raised in South Florida. He currently splits his time between his hometown of Stuart, FL and Los Angeles, CA. Cody founded Gunner Technology, a highly sought after digital agency, specializing in helping companies maximize profits through custom web development, technology efficiencies, social media strategy and search engine marketing.
As a manager and developer at ESPN for nearly six years, Cody led development and vision for two of ESPN’s most popular online features: Sports Scoreboards and GameCasts. Additionally Cody oversaw all aspects of MyESPN and ESPN’s social network, ESPN Fan Profiles. Cody worked with Technology, Editorial, Sales, Marketing and relevant business stakeholders to mold ESPN’s social media strategy, develop custom applications for it and execute it. Under his direction, ESPN successfully ported large portions of its core product from a proprietary Java stack to an open source Ruby on Rails stack, capable of standing up and performing under the tremendous load world's most popular sports site delivers.
Cody began forging his technological knowledge more than 10 years ago, developing and designing websites in college. His development work has included web development, web design, content writing, digital photography and digital video production for award-winning sites like Gainesville.com, GatorSports.com and ESPN.com. He has helped set digital strategy and direction for companies in the New York Times Regional Newspaper group, ESPN, ABC and Disney.
He is a recognized expert in web development, social media strategy, search engine optimization, conversion optimization, analytics tracking and business planning. He has worked with large interactive media companies to small and medium sized businesses. Cody motivates and inspires creative teams to deliver superb, polished work under tight deadlines.