Search Engine Optimization for Newbies: Part 3

Posted On October 26th, 2010 Author Kyle Racki Filed Under Business, Marketing 1

This is part 3 in a series of blog posts. The last two dealt with

This deals with the question: How can I improve my ranking and get closer to #1?

Google looks at a number of factors to decide how highly to place a website for a given search term. One important factor is the age of the domain. So if you had a url like www.dartmouthcomputers.net for a couple of years, it’s already likely to rank higher than a brand new url you just purchased last week.

Link Building

Think of Google as a snob in school that only likes the popular kids and their friends. Google has it’s own way of ranking how important a website is called PageRank. It is measured on a scale of 1 to 10, so a website like Apple has an extremely high PageRank, whereas a new website has next to nothing.

The way to increase your PageRank is by having website’s with higher rankings (the popular kids) link to your website. When another site links to yours it is called an inbound link. The best thing you can do to rank higher for your chosen keywords is to get as many high quality links as possible. I say “high quality” because if you have other low ranking sites linking to yours, there will be slim to no improvement in your ranking. But if you can get a really high-traffic website link to yours, you will see almost immediate benefit to traffic and search rankings.

So how do you convince another company or blogger to link to your site? Like anything else on the web, content is king. If you have an informative or entertaining piece of content or if your company provides a product or service that is valuable, use this as leverage to entice another website to give you an inbound link.

The Benefit of Blogs

Having a company blog is a great structure for producing unique — if you are committed to keeping it up to date that is. Let’s face it, a basic site that just lists your products or services and has company history and contact information is unlikely to entice any other website, but if you have something truly worthwhile then that is called Linkbait, or content produced solely for the purpose of becoming viral.

As an example, if you were a computer repair-shop that wanted to get good quality links, you might produce an instructional blog post called “5 first steps of diagnosing a problem with your PC”, or “How to upgrade RAM in your computer”. These types of posts have multiple benefits; They establish you as an expert in your field, gaining you a loyal following and users are likely to bookmark the page and/or pass it around via Facebook, Twitter or email. Secondly, another website may link to it in their own blog post that discusses a related topic, thus getting you that precious inbound link which in turn increases your PageRank and drives search traffic.

A Case Study

Here’s an example of how Headspace implemented a successful Linkbait strategy for ourselves:

At Headspace, we use the software ExpressionEngine as our content management system of choice which let’s our clients update their own website from an easy to use control panel. When we do that, we normally give them an instruction manual PDF to use as a reference in case they forget some of the basic functions. I had designed an attractive manual complete with large, captioned screenshots and a table of contents.

Knowing that there are thousands of ExpressionEngine developers out there who have the same need for their clients, I posted the PDF to our blog and included the working files so they could rebrand it for their clients. Then I sent this link with a description to a variety of social media sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, Twitter etc. and I posted it to the official ExpressionEngine forum.

The bait worked. Within about a week or two, several prominent bloggers in the EE community wrote posts about this Client Guide, praised Headspace for providing it free of charge and linked to our site. Those links continue to drive traffic to our site and our ranking for “web design halifax” has stayed consistently high, within the top few results on Google.

White Hat/Black Hat

This type of online marketing is slow and deliberate, but if you stay committed to it, you will see great long term results. This style of White Hat SEO differs from what is called Black Hat SEO which is about nasty things like keyword stuffing and getting links on paid directories which may give you a quick boost in rankings, but will go down just as quickly and put you at risk for penalization.

Closing

As you can probably tell, SEO is a broad and deep subject with several sub specialties within it. There are internet marketers with broad general knowledge about the topic as well as highly priced specialty firms who focus on only one aspect of it, such as on-page optimization, copywriting or link-building.

If you are new to this topic and looking to get your website rebuilt, hopefully this will help you in knowing what questions to ask a design firm. Even still, if you are a business just looking for how to improve your ranking I hope this series gave you a good foundation of knowledge to begin exploring further. A great resource to begin learning more is SEO Moz.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below.

Headspace Design