Hey there;
I was hanging out on Lynn Terry’s very cool private elite mastermind forum (LearningWithLynn.com) this morning and I ran into someone who asked for a simple explanation of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Here is what the poster said (I deleted and changed some stuff to protect her identity since LearningWithLynn.com is a private forum):
This may sound silly to the Pros, but your help would be appreciated as I really need to understand this aspect of my business.
I have been writing blog posts to my main site and have seen a number of them go to #1 on Google in a few days. The only thing I do is focus on keywords and especially long-tail keywords as taught by Lynn.
While I'm happy that it's happening I'd like to understand more. Help, please?!
I took this question to be “please help me understand more about SEO,” and I thought you might be interested in my reply. (Note that this discussion will probably be pretty long, which is one of the things I love about LearningWithLynn.com.)
Like most things in life, the 80/20 rule applies.
When someone opens google.com and types "best wireless headset for pc" (without the quotes) what happens?
Google does two things (basically):
- It get the list of all the pages (pages, not sites) that it knows about (all teh pages it has indexed) that have something to do with "best wireless headset for pc"
- It ranks them in order of importance the best it can and show the best ones first.
Remember, Google's goal is ALWAYS to guess what will help the searcher the most and put that at the top of the list. They need to do that, because if they do a poor job finding what you are looking for, you will use Bing.com next time and Google will lose ad revenue. Simple as that.
OK — as the page owner/author there are only 2 things you can do
- Optimize stuff on the page (on-page SEO)
- Optimize stuff off the page (off-page SEO)
By on-page optimization, of course, I mean making sure that you do the things that tell Google what your web page is about. By far, the most important thing is having your keywords in your HTML title tag. But, you might also want to have your keywords in the URL (or the domain name for specific highly targeted applications). You also want to have your keywords and related content in the article.
Off-page optimization, on the other hand, refers to making sure that Google knows that other people value your page.
As you probably already know, Google tries to determine if people value your page by counting the number of backlinks to your page. You can think of them as votes for your page.
People say that there are over 200 factors considered in the Google search engine algorithm. However, it’s been shown numerous times that one of the most important factors is the number of backlinks to your site.
Note that G seems to consider the anchor text of the link when trying to decide what your page is actually about (and/or how much to value the link). That means that if it sees links that say Click here for a review of the "best wireless headset for pc" — that helps more than a link with unrelated keywords.
So, think 80/20 rule for SEO. Get links with your keywords in the anchor text, and make sure your keywords are in your title tag, URL and article.
Don't believe me about the importance of backlinks?
Check this out. Google "click here" without the quotes. What do you see? (You can see the results here).
That's right — acrobat reader. Why? Because there are 1.6M pages out there that say "click here" to get acrobat reader. Note that "click here" is NOWHERE on the page.
If you need help getting your web business going (or getting to the next level), come hang out with us at LearningWithLynn.com. You’ll love it (I do).
Well, congratulations. If you or yours run into any problems due to the horrific economy, you can thank yourself and all those other entrepreneurs big and small who have, through outsourcing of exactly this type, helped that happen. You’re just the latest in a long line, though. For years now — starting in the 90s thanks to Bill Clinton and accelerating through the entire first decade of the new millennium — I watched as our once vaunted middle class got ripped to shreds as high tech jobs, and jobs of this type, were sent off shore with abandon, while the wages for those jobs that did remain here were bought (and are being brought) down to 3rd world level.
Now, ultimately I’m an optimist — I think there will be a great awakening that will cause a lot of things to change, but I don’t think the middle class will ever come back nor do I think the U.S. itself will ever again be the world power it once was. You can’t destroy a segment of society — or the economy — and not reap the results. Given what I’ve seen up close and personal, I’ve been utterly amazed at how resilient our economy has been, up until the time the banksters got ultra greedy and nearly brought the whole world economy down last Fall.
But here’s a tip for you: you don’t have to go to all the trouble of going to Phillipine job boards. There are job boards here (Elance, for example), where you can get all sorts of freelance services for pennies on the dollar. Some folks here in the U.S. are desperate enough that they will work for well under minimum wage, and then there are all those in all those 3rd world countries for whom $3 an hour or even less is a small fortune. If you look around a bit on these U.S.sites, you might also see some of the job listings themselves now include this requirement: “Native English speakers only, please.”
Hmmm — this post has nothing to do with outsourcing. Did you mean to put this comment somewhere else?
Moved this comment here:
http://www.masonworld.com/internet-marketing/outsourcing-backlinks/comment-page-1/#comment-6790
Mark awesome post man,, anytime I can grow my SEO brain cells I am all for it 🙂
Now the bad.. please dump that slow moving pop up..lol the most annoying thing ever man.. shadow box would be better.
Had to share, since I just came from 3 blogs today that have worse pops then yours,, very annoying.. I like your site.. I think that pop takes away from your posts.
LOL — I will definately consider it. Thanks, man. You are not the first to complain.