SEO 101: Eight Techniques You Can Use to Get Google to See Your Website
As mentioned previously, I’m working with Eric Qualman, Dave Kerpen, Lon Safko, Phyllis Khare, Andrea Vahl, Adam Metz and Chuck Martin on a new initiative called 5 Star Speakers. Our goal for the organization is to provide a single website where event planners, corporations and speaker’s bureaus can go to connect with several of the world’s top keynote speakers.
Not long ago, Lon Safko, the author of The Social Media Bible and The Fusion Marketing Bible, wrote an email to the members of the 5 Star team that outlined several good tips on how to use SEO to drive more traffic to blogs and websites.
The email was so good, I asked Lon if we could adapt it and share it with members of the 60 Second Marketer community. Lon graciously agreed.
Here goes:
Google, Bing and Yahoo! have an algorithm or mathematical equation that looks at about 148 different items on a web page. Google analyzes each item and gives it a weight; a multiple based on it’s importance. It then takes all these numbers and reduces them to a final number between 0 and 9; 9 being the best. This is Larry Page’s (founder of Google) definition for Page Rank.
Based on the keywords used in the content of each page and the page rank, Google (and others) will display those pages for a given set of keywords (or keyword phrases), in order of their page rank.
From what we can tell, three of the 148 items that Google rates the highest are Freshness, Google Juice (number of indexed pages for your domain with a given set of keywords), and Link Love (the number of External Reputable Links). One of the less important criteria (but still important) is Keyword Density (number of similar keywords used on a particular page).
Here’s a little more background on each of the top four:
Freshness: Blogs are, by definition, fresher than a standard HTML web page. Blogs are written often, while web pages sit untouched for long periods of time. You win on the freshness scale when you use something like WordPress to update a blog regularly.
Google Juice: The more content you can create and post about topics such as “keynote speakers,” “speaking,” “social media,” “marketing” etc., the more pages Google will have indexed for that domain and those keywords. As a blogger, you should always be working on creating content. The more, the faster, the better.
Link Love: Or External Reputable Links is when the site and multiple pages are linked to from an outside web site, such as Mashable or Social Media Examiner linking to the 60 Second Marketer blog. The more links, the higher we score.
Keyword Density: You can no longer spike the keywords in the Meta Keyword section as Google no longer reads that, but you can include specific keywords in your content that telegraph search engines about what the blog post is about. A good rule of thumb is that about 1% to 3% of your words might be your target keywords. Any more than that and it’ll be viewed as spam by search engines.
Other Tricks You Can Use to Improve Your SEO.
Titles and Content: Every photo, PDF, Word Doc, attachment, etc. needs to have keywords in both their titles and their content. Google actually opens the Document, PDF, etc. and looks for the same keywords.
Alt Tags: Whenever you insert an image into a page or blog post, you are asked for the alt tag (alternative text). Many people almost always skip this step, but you shouldn’t. This text is displayed when the image isn’t. Google assumes that if the alt tags also show keywords, they must be “key” words and you get extra points for them.
Headings, bold, and hyperlinks: Use the keywords in headings, bold, and hyperlinks. Google assumes that if a word that is in a headings, bolded or hyperlinked is important to the reader, then they are important words and we get extra points for those words.
Sign Your Blogs: Another trick I use is that I sign my blogs “… Lon Safko”. To the reader it just looks like I signed my blog, but to the search engines, it ties my name as keywords to that content and strengthens my names association to those keywords.
There are a number of other ways to improve your rankings in search engines, but if you focus on these key items, you’ll be well on your way to your goal of getting a #1 spot on Google, Bing or Yahoo!
Lon Safko is a respected keynote speaker and the author of The Social Media Bible andThe Fusion Marketing Bible,