Understanding the Principles of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a lot about managing various different web marketing factors and metrics that make up the ever changing “Google algorithm.”From our experience and research, all of the following (below) may be considered at different times as part of contributing to a website’s page rank. While the allocation or weighting of these different elements without fail change over time, our SOP cannot fail: maximize all of the elements applicable to your site that your budget allows. You can either pay a web marketing firm like IMM to launch and manage your campaign or hire our web marketing training division to teach you or your people how to manage the campaign.
LINKS: (most important factor)
- Incoming links to your site
- Authority of referring link or site page rank ( a .edu is a high authority link)
- Live links within site (self referencing hyper links)
- Links to/from Google, Yahoo, etc.
HITS:
- Total hits
- Total unique persons
- Total return visits per person
- Length of time spent (by site and page)
Relevance:
In order for Google to know, without question what your site is all about, first, your site must be optimized for the proper keywords. Presence and distribution of keywords and long tail key phrases in the right proportion, consistently throughout the site in titles, headers, H1 & alt tags etc is imperative for creating this relevance.
CONTENTS:
Content is king! The more the better for any site. The more content, the more pages there are to target different variations and kinds of keywords. Also, every time new content is added to a site, Google will fully index/spider your site.
QUALITY:
Handsome, useful, interesting, informative… all these add to the value of the site, right? Well, yes and no. If your site has these good qualities, then its use and popularity may increase, but not because the robots or spiders like it. Alas, “AI” is not so advanced that search engines have aesthetics.
Quality, it turns out, is defined negatively. When IMM optimizes your site, we see to it that the following manipulative and dishonest features are drawn to your immediate attention:
- Hidden text and hidden links.
- Cloaking and deceptive redirects.
- Automated queries to search engines.
- Pages artificially overloaded with keywords (keyword spamming).
- Pages loaded with irrelevant keywords.
- Substantially duplicated pages, domains, or sub domains.
- Pages or links that install malware and badware.
- Extra landing or “doorway” pages that add nothing original.
- Affiliate programs that lack original content.
- Affiliate programs to which your site adds no value.
WE HAVE INTEGRITY. This, it turns out, is good for you! GOOGLE has promulgated these new guidelines for the property they call “Quality,” which is a significant feature of its mysterious PageRank algorithm. Most importantly, lacking quality results in SEO disaster, because GOOGLE holds the power to eliminate your site entirely from the rankings!
Call us at 888-490-6676 or fill out our web marketing design interview to get started!
