SEO and Link Building
In my last post I talked about landing pages and how to create them to be successful. Then towards the end I talked about how UI and UX worked. Now to tie that all together, I will be talking about SEO and link building.
SEO
Search engine optimization is about becoming more visible in organic search engine results. It uses creative and technical elements to help to make your website more friendly to search engines, improve your ranking, and gain awareness which in turn will drive more traffic to your website. The reason why the top 3 search results appear on google when you search something is due to SEO. It helps you begin the inbound methodology by attracting users to your page from the search results.
To be able to optimize SEO, first we should learn about how search engines work. Search engines crawl and rank, and provide a ranking list of websites. Crawling and ranking is when “spiders” sort through information, documents, media, you name it and to find the content you need and create the best path using these links. These links then allow for their automated robots or “spiders” to reach these connected documents. Then of course as we all know search engines provide answers based on relevance and popularity.
Basics
Search engines provide a lot of traffic to your page so you want to make sure you are driving as much traffic as possible. This means you need to be as optimized as possible. The majority of people click on the first website that is provided to them when they search for something. But what if you are on number 6 on the list? Chances are, unless someone really likes multiple sources for information, that page will not be read. So how do we use SEO to become the first or even second option in the search list?
1) Understand
To be able to know what keywords to use you need to do research about the buyer persona, what they want, and how they might search. Once you’ve gathered that information you keywords based off of the research. Make sure to use the language they use and search with. Depending on the visitors location in the buyer’s journey, they will use different keywords, so it’s important to understand them all and be specific to the type of visitor.
2) Content
You want to use content that is relevant and natural to the user, and have a variation of them so that depending on what they search they can still reach this content. Having more valuable content, will increase the user’s satisfaction. Their content should be centered around which keyword they use and indexable. You can use the keywords in the body, titles, URL and images. If the keyword is of the long tail variety, you can use it in the title or in sentences throughout your content. Using internal and external links can also help to drive traffic to your page. Promote your content because the more links you have referring to your page, the more you can boost your rank status.
Link Building
Link building is another important part of SEO. According to Moz, link building is the process of acquiring links from other websites to your own. As talked about above, search engines use links to crawl the web, which is why link building is so important. Spiders can’t crawl the web if there isn’t anything to crawl! Also the more valuable your page is, more referral you can receive. The more pages that you have linked back to your page, the higher your rank can be. A link consists of the start of the link tag, link referral location, visible/anchor text of the link, and the closure link of tag.
Click here to learn more about what each part of the link does.
Links are important to search engines because they use them to discover new links, and decide how a page should rank within results.
Thanks!
-Dani