What exactly IS SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it is more commonly known, is the process of improving the volume and quality of your website traffic through “natural” or “organic” searches.  This means FREE traffic for you!

Now, obviously, the better your ranking in the search engines, the more likely you will get traffic.  Everyone’s goal is to get on the first page of Google.  But how is that possible? 

The key to achieving SEO is keyword research.  

Think of keyword research like determining your target audience.  You need to be specific – VERY specific.   This means that you need to determine a long-tail keyword.   A long-tail keyword is made up of at least 3 words, to help narrow the search. 

For example, if you Google the term, “virtual assistant”, there are 13.4 million entries.  However, if you Google the term, “virtual assistant, marketing”, the search narrows to only 1.3 million.  And, to go one step further, if you Google the term, “virtual assistant, real estate marketing, the search is now only 581,000.

So, as you can see, the benefit of the long-tail keyword is that you get highly targeted traffic, with less competition.  This means that the person who Googled for that term is looking for that specific service, and he/she is more likely to find what they need. 

Now that you have determined the long-tail keyword you want to focus on, you need to do three things in a blog post:

1. Include it in the title
2. Use the long-tail keyword in the body of your blog post
3. Add a link with that keyword phrase  (within your blog post)

Why is this important?

Each night, the search engine “spiders” go crawling around the web for new content.  The spiders look to blogs as one of the first places for new content since it can be updated regularly.  When you have your long-tail keyword phrase in the title and body of your post it is given a higher authority (more points).  Then, when you include a link with that phrase, it is given more points for a high quality link.  All these “points” add up and help you achieve a higher ranking in the search engines.

Now, you are one step closer to first spot in Google!

 

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