Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
I talk a lot about SEO on this blog.
The fact is that SEO is one of the most important and relied upon traffic sources on the entire Internet. Hundreds of thousands of businesses across the globe rely solely on SEO to fuel their businesses with the rankings, traffic, and leads they need to survive.
Learning SEO can be a huge pain in the ass. I know that when I first started, I struggled to understand a lot of the concepts. The only reason being was that I tried to learn everything before I attempted to rank for a single keyword. The most important thing to do when learning SEO is to set goals…
…and your first goal should be to understand the basic SEO concepts. Once you understand basic SEO concepts, your next goal should be to rank for A KEYWORD and understand why you ranked for it. It’s essential to realize that basic SEO concepts are the most important. The complex stuff the SEO “gurus” scare you off with is mostly irrelevant to most webmasters.
The fact is you only need to learn around 20% of SEO to achieve 80% of the results. If you want to learn the extra 80% for a measly 20% extra SEO rankings and traffic, go for it. But the basic 20% of SEO concepts will allow you to rank for almost anything you want.
SEO consists of several hundred factors. But you only need to understand and use a few dozen of them to achieve serious results.
Here are the basic SEO concepts and a short introduction to SEO following them:
- Search engine results are based on RELEVANCY and POPULARITY.
- One way search engines show listings is based on how relevant they are to the keyword being searched. This can be because the keyword being searched is in the title, description, header tags, or content body of the listed result/s.
- The other way search engines display listings is based on how popular the RELEVANT results are. The search engines will always display relevant results. The way search engines order the relevant results is based on popularity.
- Popularity is based on 2 fundamental components; backlinks and social presence or social media.
- Social Media in the form of shares i.e. Facebook likes, Tweets, Re-Tweets, Bookmarks and Google +1′s.
- Backlinks in the form of targeted anchor text linking back to your site from others.
- Anchor text is the text used to link from one site to another – VERY IMPORTANT – search engines boost you for the keywords you use as anchor text.
- Google is the only search engine SEO’s really pay attention to, they have the biggest market share in search engines by a long shot.
- There is on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
- On-page is optimizing your site to rank for keywords by changing on-site factors like content and structure.
- Off-page is optimizing your site to for keywords by building popularity in the form of backlinks and social presence.
Understanding the concepts above will allow you to rank for anything. This is how you rank…
You start by choosing a target keyword. Once chosen, you write a RELEVANT piece of content that targets the keyword. You can optimize the content on-page by including the keyword in the title, description, throughout the body, and in what are called header tags.
Very basic SEO. There are several ways in which you can further optimize your site on-page, but most unnecessary and not worth learning. For example, it’s been proven that raising keyword density, bolding, and italicizing keywords will boost rankings. While that may be true; it barely boosts rankings and is not worth the risk of over-optimization.
If you over-optimize your site on-page Google can give you a penalty or lower your rankings. When optimizing your site, it’s best to keep keyword density to 5% or less to avoid keyword stuffing penalties. It’s very important to have the keyword you’re targeting in your title, description, and header tag.
Anything besides the above I consider overkill and not worth the time or risk of over-optimization. Finally, doing the above will create ultra-relevant content. Although…
Creating a relevant piece of content isn’t enough to rank for most keywords. With that being said; if you’ve got a powerful website or are in a low competition niche; sometimes relevant content is all you need to rank. To boost your rankings you must optimize off-site by showing Google your content is popular.
==>>> Click here to continue to “Basic SEO Concepts Expanded“
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Jessica L., July 15, 2011, 14:35
Thanks for this detailed explanation of SEO concepts. SEO can be quite overwhelming, but breaking it down into these fundamental concepts makes it a lot more manageable. It really helped me understand the basics and how to get started with optimizing my website.
Emily R., July 15, 2011, 16:45
I appreciate the straightforward approach to explaining SEO. It’s easy to get lost in all the technical jargon. This is exactly what I needed. I’ve been struggling with SEO for my blog, and now I have a clear starting point. Thank you!
Linda K., July 15, 2011, 18:20
Great overview of SEO basics. It’s amazing how focusing on just 20% of the factors can yield 80% of the results. Very insightful!
Tom H., July 15, 2011, 19:05
Thanks for simplifying SEO concepts. I now feel more confident in applying these strategies to my website.
Alice M., July 15, 2011, 19:50
Very useful information! I have been looking for a simple guide to SEO, and this post is perfect. I liked how you emphasized the importance of relevancy and popularity in search engine results. Keep up the good work!
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At sixty-one, with only so many hours left to learn this properly, the ‘20% of SEO gets you 80% of the results’ framing is the most useful sentence in the post — permission to stop reading advanced guides and just do the six basics well.
Reading the on-page/off-page split made me think less about SEO and more about how every trade has this same divide — the part of the work the customer sees and judges you on, and the part happening behind the counter that they never notice until it’s missing. Bike shop’s the same. Nobody ever compliments the headset torque. They just come back.
Declan’s split is basically front-of-house versus back-office, and twenty-two years in corporate taught me the same lesson this post is dancing around: the org always over-invests in the visible 20%, whatever gets seen in a review, and under-invests in the boring 80% nobody audits until it breaks. I sat through years of town-hall decks polished within an inch of their life, fonts agonized over, animations timed, while the underwriting process two floors down hadn’t been touched since before I joined and was quietly costing the business far more than any slide ever won it. Whether that’s ‘on-page vs off-page’ or ‘deck vs process,’ it’s the identical failure wearing different vocabulary, and it survives because the visible 20% is what gets you promoted and the invisible 80% is what gets you fired, just usually somebody else.
Nice framing. Fine, but SEO isn’t actually invisible like torque is; Google tells you what it’s rewarding, in the guidelines. That’s just work most people can’t be bothered to read.
Ran a diner for nineteen years, and the way a new customer heard about us before ever walking in the door was never the sign out front, it was somebody else at their own kitchen table saying the biscuits were worth the drive. That’s the ‘popularity’ half of this post in plain terms — relevancy gets you found, but somebody else’s word is what gets you trusted.
Birdie’s kitchen-table version is the one to keep. If you want the online equivalent, try this: this week, ask three people who already know your work to mention it once, unprompted, wherever they’d naturally talk about it — no pitch, no link request. What changes when the mention comes from them instead of you?
Nineteen years, no SEO plan. Worked fine. Maybe the diner business and this one aren’t as different as this post assumes.
The strongest case against ‘just learn the basic 20%’: in a genuinely competitive niche, everyone else has also learned that same 20%, so the actual edge lives entirely in the remaining 80% the post tells you to skip. I’m not sure I believe that, but it’s the argument this post doesn’t address.