Remember when you were a kid and you saw your first magic trick? If you’re my age it was probably David Copperfield performing it on TV and the sense of wonder, excitement and mystery were captivating. These days seeing guys float a la David Blaine just isn’t quite the same. But there’s a different kind of trick that gets my attention, its called SEO or Search Engine Optimization.
Basically, it’s all about strategies and tactics that make sure you get your website to the top of Google, Yahoo and Bing search results. Why should we care about search engine results? My answer is, you don’t have to if you have some aversion to making money… However, for those of us who have businesses and need to be at the top of the search results it’s extremely important.
Now lets do the math… High search engine rankings = more visitors to your site. More visitors + your product or service for sale on your site = more cash in your pocket. Simple right? Good. So, lets get some of the basics to better ranking spelled out here.
The web is run by search engines the biggest of these being Google. The search engines (we’ll just say Google from here on..) need to sort through all the sites that exist online and determine who should rank first for a particular keyword or phrase. So they create requirements for search engine ranking. This filters out the sites that don’t meet the criteria separating them from the sites that do. To give you an example, traffic to your site aka visitors is one of the criteria Google uses to determine ranking.
So, let’s suppose we’re searching for the term “Magic Tricks” a site that has 50,000 visitors a month is going to rank higher than a site that only has 3,000 visitors per month. Kidzone in this example gets way more visitors per month than magictrickstore.com because it’s ranked #1 for the phrase “Magic tricks”, that’s huge when each visitor is a potential client. Now it probably seems unfair that a site that gets more traffic should rank higher and therefore get even more traffic but that’s kind of the point. Google assumes that a site with lots of visitors must be relevant to what people want when they search for the phrase “Magic Tricks” and so they send that site even more visitors by ranking them higher in the search results.
Now that you have an idea about Google’s ranking criteria I’m going to let you in on some of the things they look for when ranking your site.
- Domain Quality – This means they look to see if your keyword is in your sites domain name. i.e. “magictricks.com”
- Title Relevance – This is your sites title that appears at the top of your browser it should have your keyword in it.
- Links to URL – Links that point to your site are like votes that say “we vouch for this site.” Very Important.
- Links to Domain – This is the number of links that point to pages on your site aside from your homepage URL.
- Pages Indexed – Whenever you add pages to your site Google looks at them the more it has memory of the better.
- Cache Recency – This measurement says “this site updates their content frequently which makes them relevant.”
- Domain Age – This is another measure of authority, the older the site the higher the chance it’s relevant.
Try to keep in mind that I am purposely over-simplifying this for the sake of clarity. There are entire courses on this subject that cost thousands, taught by experts who live and breathe SEO. Explaining all these concepts in depth is beyond the scope of this post, my goal is to orient you and get you started on the right foot.
I’ve included a quick link to Google’s explanation of how they index sites – Here
Along with Google’s Starter Guide on how to improve your SEO – Here
So, that’s my SEO run down and no one had to be sawed in half…
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I can not thank you adequately for the posts on your web site. I know you’d put a lot of time and effort into them and hope you know how much I appreciate it. I hope I’ll do exactly the same for someone else at some point.
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