SEO In A Nutshell

Posted at August 20, 2010

I am down in Atlanta this weekend for NAMS 4, a 3 day conference for Internet Marketers. There are always some great presentations and workshops that teach me something new and I’m sure this go-around won’t be any different.

But one of my favorite aspects of attending this event is connecting with other marketers and “talking shop”. It is particularly rewarding if I can teach a little something here and there in conversations.

Yesterday for example I shared lunch and a great conversation about beginning SEO with Nicole Dean and Lain Ehmann. Lain piked our brains about a few topics but most of it focused around SEO. Her biggest problem is information overload. There are so many different articles, reports and products about SEO out there and everyone seems to have a slightly different strategy.

I broke it down for her into “SEO in a Nutshell”, which is just enough info about how you can optimize your pages and blog posts and get some rankings without getting too complicated. I thought I’d share with you today what I told her over lunch.

SEO In A Nutshell


There are only a handful of concepts you need to grasp to start optimizing your pages so you can rank for some keywords. Here they are…

Keyword Research

You can’t start to rank for something unless you know what you want to rank for. The “key” to keyword research is to find a term that strikes a balance between the amount of traffic you get and how hard it is to rank for it.

Let me give you an example:

I’ve been doing a little research recently on article marketing. Trying to rank for “article marketing” would be almost impossible. Yes, this keyword is getting a lot of traffic (it’s searched about 250 times per day), but there are  also a LOT of people trying to rank for that term.

By comparison let’s look at “best article marketing tips”. It’s only searched about 5 times per day, but there is so little competition for this keyword phrase, that you could probably write an article or blog post titled “My 3 Best Article Marketing Tips” and rank on the first page of Google with minimal work.

Find that balance between how often a term is searched and how hard it will be to rank for it.

If you want to learn a little more about Keyword Research, listen to this panel discussion I was involved in along with SEO experts Karon Thackston, Lynn Terry and Dan Morris. Here’s a picture:

Keyword Panel at NAMS 4 with Susanne Myers, Karen Thackston, Lynn Terry and Dan Morris

Title Tag

Now that you have your keyword, you want to make sure it appears in the title tag of your new web page. If you are using blogging software like wordpress, just make sure your keyword is in the title of your post or page. If you are creating static html pages, make sure you add the meta title tag.

Our keyword example above was “best article marketing tips”, so I may use a little like “My Best Article Marketing Tips Revealed” as the title of my new blog post. If you can include your keyword as early as possible in the title, but also make sure it reads well and is interesting.

It is also a good idea to use the same keyword again somewhere in the first 100 words of your content.

The rest of this simple way to do SEO (search engine optimization) is all about links.

Internal Links

These are the links within your site and you want to make sure you use the keyword in the anchor text when you point to this new page. If you are using wordpress as your blogging software, it will automatically do this for you. If you are creating a static html site, make sure you are linking from your homepage or article page to this new page with “best article marketing tips” as part of the text that links to the page.

External Links

Now that we have the internal linking set up, it’s time to go out and get some links from other sites across the internet that have our keyword in the anchor text. For a long tail keyphrase like “best article marketing tips”, it shouldn’t take more than a few links to get it to rank. For a more competitive keyword, you want to spend more and more time building those backlinks.

By now you’re probably wondering where you can get those external links. Here are a few simple ideas.

Yes, you can get a lot more complicated than that, but there is no need for most of us. If you can implement just these few things, you should see your traffic and ranking improve.

Susanne Myers

P.S.  If you are ready to learn more about backlinks (both internal and external), I would like to invite you to join my link building class at EasyLinkLove.com

You may also like to read:

  1. What Is SEO
  2. Keyword Research Skills That Help Pay The Bills
  3. Google Adwords Keyword Tool Review
  4. Targeted Link Popularity
  5. Anchor Text Link Explained

SEO

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