Define SEO and Linkbuilding

We hear that there is confusion as to what SEO is. While we have spoken a lot about components of SEO, we wanted to put together a working definition of SEO and link building to help paint a complete picture.

There are several key elements involved in any and every SEO campaign (and a million complex variables to control for – but we will save those for a later day).

To get the discussion started, the fundamental elements and their respective definitions are as follows:

Keywords
These are the words someone types into a search engine to find a company like yours.

It is important to remember that a keyword is usually not a single word but, instead, most often a string of words relating to your product. If you are looking for white Nike basketball shoes, you would probably type in:

The entire search query typed in to find those new white shoes is a variation of the keyword people selling them are optimizing for on their website.

When we take on a client, we always narrow down the list of keywords we target to a very manageable number to say something like 10 – 40 (depending on what the client is trying to do). For those who are taking on their SEO campaign, a list no bigger than 10 is probably the right choice.

Content

Content is another broad term used in the marketing world. In essence, content is any information that resides on your site or somewhere on the web.

The most common examples from an SEO perspective need to be optimized for are:

1. Blog Articles
2. Text on your websites page
3. Studies
4. Images and Infographics
5. Videos
6. Your contact information
7. Product or Business Reviews / Testimonials
8. Maps

Check out our On-Page SEO post for a quick tutorial on how to optimize the very basics.

Links and your Link Profile

In the SEO world, links are still what primarily makes the world go round.

TThere is a tonne of ways to get links. Any mention of your site or your business on another website out there comprises your link profile.

For the most part, the best links look exactly (well sort of) like:

“The Neumarkets team are SEO Geniuses… we’re great, we’re great…”

Or some other phrase that matches the context of what people will be clicking on and directed to.

We don’t have a page on the keyword “SEO Geniuses” – but ideally, you’d want the link to a page talking about why you, or in this case, we are marketing geniuses. It’s crucial to always link to the proper URL, i.e. https://neumarkets.com, not www.neumarkets.com.

Unfortunately, not all links are equal. In later installments of this series, we’ll talk about link profiling, and outreach (talking with bloggers to get mentions).

The purpose of SEO

It’s important to focus on your objective is to avoid wasting time and money on things that do not mesh.

For this reason, the purpose of SEO isn’t to hold the number one rank on Google for every keyword related to your business, but to get more traffic to your website. There is a fundamental difference here; ranking for every keyword for your business can be extremely costly (in terms of time and money) and, in some cases, unrealistic.

However, improving your web traffic by targeting specific keywords that both receive a reasonable amount of search traffic and fit well with your business and is attainable.

While it might seem obvious to some – this is an important distinction and one that many SEO companies forget.

In later posts, we will discuss some of the other main elements, such as:

• the importance of site structure
• metadata and search click-throughs (including some pretty recent, and proven strategies)
• attracting links and link profiling
• the impact of social media on SEO
• Search engine updates and changes that have affected SEO’s

If you need help – our door is always open 😉