The Alchemy of SEO

Sensational SEO is a skillful mix of art and science, so before you go spending the big bucks on grandiose solutions, it’s essential to understand the basic building blocks, and how keywords play into your rank. After all, your Web site isn’t really visible to search engines; your keywords are. And here-in lies the alchemy — if you incorporate a variety of keywords with high consumer interest and low competition usage, you’re golden! Here’s how we work in-house (without breaking the bank) to increase our client’s chances of becoming visible on search engine results pages (Google, Bing, Yahoo):

Step 1: Brainstorm a long list of short phrases (2-3 words per phrase) that are meaningful to the core of your business. Try to be specific. The more services you offer, the bigger your list. If you’re a bakery specializes in muffins, scones, and cupcakes, your list might include phrases like “banana-nut muffins”, “blueberry scones”, and “chocolate cupcakes” (yum, right?!). At this phase of the project, it’s helpful to seek ideas from the team that helps you to deliver services every day.

Step 2: It’s now time to take the guess-work out of SEO and fine-tune your list, including the addition of long-tail and related phrases, based on actual Web statistics.  In order to be effective, your list should capitalize on consumer habits while alluding the competition.   Long-tail phrases (gluten-free banana-nut muffins, low-fat blueberry scones, and sugar-free chocolate cupcakes) contain the short phrase, but are more descriptive. Related phrases (baked goods or cupcake shop) are more generalized. Wordtracker makes this step a cinch. Simply sign up for an account and upload your list of short phrases, and it will analyze keywords based on search engine data and also crawl the Web for popular long-tail and related keyword phrases. To help you get started, they offer a free trial (bonus!).

Step 3: Once you have a strategic list of keywords and phrases, it’s time to get writing. This is art — it takes creativity and talent to make keyword-rich content flow (and not sound like spam). Remember, search engines are looking for authentic pages, so diversity matters. Rather than saying “blueberry muffin” five times in the first paragraph. Choose 5 distinct but related keyword phrases to illustrate your point. Hint: we like to use our keyword list to create an article or Web page outline.

Step 4: When you finally sit down to publish your masterpiece (article, blog or Web page), it is essential to program your high-opportunity keywords and phrases into the metadata (page title, page description, headers and tags) and site index. This is what the search engine spiders actually read when archiving your page, so publishing keyword-rich content without correct metadata and indexing is the equivalent of publishing a book with a blank cover.  Too much technical jargon? Not to worry! We leave all of this (obvious science) to our programmer. If you take your list of keywords to your programmer, s/he should know exactly what metadata and site index mean, and how to encode your optimized words and phrases into these back-end bits (and if they don’t, you may want to find a new programmer or help them to get additional training).

Step 5: Last, but not least, it’s time to create strong links to your content. Search engines follow links and give more weight to pages that are easy to find. Initially, you can leverage your own assets by linking from other pages on your own website and blog and also from your social media accounts. In the long-run, you can increase the visibility of your page the old-fashioned way –  pick up the phone and find strategic partners who would be willing to share and link back to your content. Hint: If you want bonus points, then be sure to optimize the anchor text for both internal and external links (instead of saying “click here” your live link should say “chocolate scone recipe”). Optimizing off-page links (via social media and reciprocal linking strategies — stay tuned to next week’s blog!) also increase SEO success.

We hope that divulging our SEO secret potion sparks some inspiration and ends in triumph — but know that if you’re still feeling like a mad scientist more than a skilled alchemist, we’re here for you! Our team can train your team, or take the reins and deliver an artful campaign with measurable SEO results.

One Response to The Alchemy of SEO
  1. [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Sarah Kraft, Sarah Kraft. Sarah Kraft said: This week's blog tackles the alchemy of a stellar SEO campaign. Curious? http://ht.ly/3xtTA [...]

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