Define SEO and Linkbuilding

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More and more we are hearing from our clients and friends that there is so much confusion as to what SEO really is. While we have spoken a lot about specific components of SEO, we wanted to take a step back this week and put together a working definition of SEO and namely Linkbuilding 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 in to 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 something like….

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

When we take on a new 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 own SEO campaigning, a list no bigger than 10 is probably a good choice.

 

Content

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

The most common examples that 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 Basics 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.

There are a tonne of ways to get these links – but at the end of the day any mention of your site, your services or your business on another website out there comprises what is referred to as your Link Profile.

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

“The Neumarkets team are Web Marketing Geniuses…we are so great, we are so great…”

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

We don’t actually have a page on this keyword – but ideally you want the text link would go to a specific page talking about why you or in this case we are such marketing geniuses in the Kingston area. It is really important to always link to the proper URL ie. https://neumarkets.com not www.neumarkets.com

Unfortunately, not all links are made equal, in later installments of this series we will talk about link profiling (think of this as your portfolio which just like your stock portfolio – you want to try diversify), and targeted link outreach (talking with bloggers and such to get mentions).

 

The purpose of SEO

Like anything in life it is important to focus on what your objective is to avoid wasting time and money on things that do not mesh.

For this reason the purpose of SEO is not to hold the number one rank on the search engines for every keyword related to your business, but rather the purpose of SEO should be 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, vastly improving your web traffic by targeting specific keywords that both receive a reasonable amount search, and fit well with your business and is VERY 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
• meta data 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 there is anything you want to see covered, please leave us a note in the comments – or get in touch with our team!

If you need help – our door is always open 😉