The Science of Search Engine Optimization: What You Need To Know

It has become increasingly clear that marketing is much more of a science than an art. One supporting factor for this statement is search engine optimization, or SEO. To give you some background, SEO is the strategy behind improving the visibility of online content (such as your company’s website) within unpaid or “organic” search results.

As a business owner, executive, or marketing professional, you may be saying, “I know I have to do something to get found in the rankings, but I don’t know what, or how to go about it” The good news is that if you think about SEO simply, you can actually impact your rankings with out too much work or budget.

You can get the edge on SEO by creating and maintaining a specialized keyword database and optimizing these keywords according to their search engine prevalence.

Let’s give you some SEO 101. First and foremost, whether you are creating an SEO keyword strategy or building digital content, it’s important to remember the two primary criteria that search engines rank websites according to: authority and relevance.

Your website’s authority is determined by off-page SEO, or link building, which occurs by directing traffic to your website through quality inbound links. What authority really means is that other highly respected sites have links back to your site. The more respected–the higher your site is considered an authority. Of course Google decides who is respected.

Here is a great practical example. When you used a wire service (and you should) to distribute a press release and Yahoo! Finance, CNN, and CBS Marketwatch post that release (they post all releases sent out via a wire service) with a link back to your site, you just scored three very respected sites with links back to your site increasing your authority.

Relevance is determined and affected by your website’s on-page SEO, or the creation of regular content optimized by a keyword strategy. By creating a keyword strategy and implementing it within your digital content, you build up your website’s relevance, which leads to a higher search engine ranking and all the benefits we mentioned above! This is actually a two step process which includes first identifying what the “right” keywords are for your business and then creating the “right” content to drive relevance.

We take clients through a process of identification, prioritization, and implementation. This process finds all the relevant keywords being used by the target market, not the words our client’s think people are using, but the actual keywords and keyword phrases being used by searchers. Then we eliminate the irrelevant keywords and prioritize those with high search volume and low difficulty (difficulty is directly related to the number of other firms competing for these words). We use difficult terms when they are critical to the search strategy. Implementation comes in the form of website and content pages needed to deliver a highly relevant website for our clients.

There is a good chance you might be confused or hesitant over exactly how to use a keyword strategy to supplement your marketing efforts. Over the next week, we’re going to give you the lowdown on what you need to know about SEO and how your company can use it as a long-term marketing driver. Learn the basics of SEO and creating an effective keyword strategy, as well as tricks, tips and suggestions to implement it successfully!

To learn more about how a proactive search engine optimization effort will drive new visitors to your company’s website click here to download our newest Tip Guide, 4.5 Ways to Increase Site Traffic and Page Rankings.

Read more:

• What Is Search Engine Optimization?
• Best SEO Software: Top SEO tools for keyword research linkbuilding and competitor analysis