Keeping SEO Simple

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Keep SEO Simple With Basic Strategies and Consistency

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is commonly coupled with a technical or unknown overtone that is pretty scary to anyone starting their own website or blog, but it isn’t really that difficult. You don’t need to have a master’s degree in computer science to understand SEO, and moreover, incorporate an effective SEO campaign into your site.

That being said, in order to effectively optimize your content, whether it’s your blog, website or comments you are posting on other people’s sites, it is fairly time consuming. This is the good part… once you learn the basics of keeping SEO simple and providing a consistent message, you’ll soon have an effective presence with tremendous authority.

It’s good to understand why you need to optimize your page prior to moving forward. The search engines have an army of spiders, robots or web crawlers (whatever you want to call them) that are constantly searching for new information on the world wide web. The more times they notice activity pertaining to a certain link (i.e., web address or blog site), the more information they have to report to headquarters.

The more activity you have on your site, the more noticeable you become to the search engines; therefore, the higher rank you’ll receive in the search results or SERP (Search Engine Results Page) which are the results that are returned on a search engine for any given keyword.

Keeping SEO Simple for the Students

Earlier today I was speaking with Mike Bindrup, the Business Development Advisor for the UNLV Small Business Develop Center (SBDC), and he asked if I could speak with his business students tonight who are studying a course Mr. Bindrup is teaching called “How To Get Your Business Online”.

This motivated me to write this post today as I was thinking about what to say in order to not come off sounding too technical…the students probably know more than I do, lol. In keeping with this frame of mind, I wanted to portray SEO as a tool that anyone can introduce to their own business without much of a learning curve.

Simple SEO in Two Parts

Like I said above, it does take some time; however, the basics of Simple SEO doesn’t have that many rules and can be learned in a matter of a couple hours. In order to help clarify how simple seo can be, I have broken it down two parts:

1. On-Page SEO
2. Off-Page SEO

That’s pretty simple, right? Some SEO experts may say that’s a little too cut and dry, but I am a proponent of the K.I.S.S. method…Keep It Simple and Straightforward. Before you worry about what others are thinking of your site, make sure to clean up your own backyard. What I mean by that is make sure you set up your “On-page” SEO prior to worrying about the “Off-Page” stuff.

Here is a quick list of things you can do to optimize your site right now:

• Add images and make sure the descriptions, alt tags and title’s are completed. If you are unsure of what this means, feel free to contact us and we’ll do our best to assist you. If you want to use an image from another site, ask the image owner and link back to their site. This does two things, it gives them a back link, it makes them happy and it creates an ethical environment within the internet community.
• Make sure to add links to other pages (like the link to my contact us page above) of your site – I call this “internal-site linking”. This will ensure your site gets crawled and that all your pages are found by the search engines and helps to promote on-site visitation times.
• Use keywords relevant to your topic and highlight those keywords without loading up on the keywords so that your content doesn’t seem too forced.
• Use headers…use a minimum of three headers when your optimizing your pages. These headers are called h1, h2 and h3. Each header is bolded and the spiders look at the bold lettering and links prior to all the content to get an idea of what the site is all about. The headers will get a little smaller each time you add one to show the level of importance to the spiders.

Off-Page SEO is what you need to do once you have your back yard in order. keep a close eye on future posts from Trafficblogcafe.com as we’ll be following up on this post with Off-Page Simple SEO tips you can use to help you get your site ranked! If you like this post, make sure you “Like It” if you’re on facebook, “Add Me” to Google+ or send out a tweet on Twitter.

MarketingMania2012.com looks forward to your comments and feedback to help inform our community and provide a better overall experience for you.