Why SEO Is Not Optional – A Back To Basics Guide

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Why SEO Is Not Optional – A Back To Basics Guide

by Sarah Ryan on May 23rd, 2012
15 Comments

Some businesses seem to think SEO is an optional part of operating online – which it completely is – assuming you also think being found by potential clients online is also an optional part of your business.

Earlier today I was helping a new client create some new content for their website. It was the first time I had logged into their CMS (content management system). I clicked through to one page after another becoming increasingly horrified … not one single title or description field was filled out for any of the pages. This is a website that was built by a company which claims to offer ‘website design’ and ‘online marketing’! And it gets even worse…. the CMS that they were using actually lists the title and description fields as OPTIONAL!

How are clients ever supposed to realise how important SEO is, if everyone from the website designer to the CMS they use daily, tells them it is an expendable part of marketing?

So please, read on, and share with your colleagues, your clients … everyone!

SEO – Back To Basics

# 1. What Does SEO Mean?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and refers to a variety of techniques implemented to assist your website in ranking higher in the organic search results, therefore making it more likely that your potential clients will find you online.

Having potential clients find you online is not an optional part of your business. It is a necessity. The days of the yellow pages are over. Anyone searching for you is doing so online.

# 2. What Is Onsite SEO?

There are two main types of SEO – onsite and offsite. Onsite SEO refers to SEO done on your own website and includes the following :

Content

Content created with SEO in mind. So, for example, a blog post that includes relevant keywords in the title, as well as in the main body of the post. This post for instance is about SEO and includes SEO in the blog title, and in numerous places throughout the text body. Keyword density on a webpage is one of the factors a search engine considers when ranking sites.

URL Addresses

Search engines also look at your url address, and if it’s just www.yourbusiness.com/6788974897381 then the search engine has no idea what that page is about from looking at the url. It is better to properly structure your urls to include relevant keywords e.g. www.tweakyourbiz.com/marketing/ which helps indicate to the search engines what that webpage is about.

Images

All uploaded images should have an image file name and an alt tag.

Before you upload an image to a blog post, make sure to name that image the same name as your blog post, or another relevant name. This means that if someone is searching in Google Images, or similar, using your businesses’ keywords, the image you have uploaded will show up.

The alt tag is the text that appears when an image hasn’t loaded i.e. when someone is viewing via a browser that blocks image downloads. Search engines read this text as well.

Title Tags & Meta Tags

These are what show up in the search engine results and therefore are the only weapon you have to persuade searchers to click on your link and visit your site, over your competitors’. In some CMSs the title tag is referred to as ‘SEO Title’, and the meta tag can be referred to as ‘Meta Description’ or ‘SEO Description’.

Headline Tags

These can be seen in the source code of your webpage as <H1> </H1> and is something the search engines also look for on a page. Blog post titles, for example, should all have H1 tags and any page title e.g. About Us, should have the headline tags inserted into the HTML as well; most CMSs have it built in so you don’t have to be able to write HTML, you can just highlight the words and select ‘Heading 1’.

Internal Links

These are links on your website to other pages on your website. This can frequently be done with blog posts, linking to previously posted articles that might explain a section of the new post, for example, or provide the reader with further valuable information.

When creating these kinds of links, ensure to use appropriate keywords or phrases as your anchor text (the linked text), as again, this is something the search engines will read, and will assume that the anchor text is related to the link. So instead of having ‘click here’ as your anchor text (which tells a search engine nothing), instead use ‘SEO tips’ or whichever keywords indicate what that page you are linking to is about.

# 3. What Is Offsite SEO?

Offsite SEO is SEO done away from your website. This includes:

Links

These are links from other websites to yours. So just as above we used anchor text to link internally and give the search engines signals regarding keywords, links from external sites also tell the search engines what keywords your site is relevant for, and serve as a recommendation from that external site, that your site is worth visiting.

There is a practice among some to trade links – “I’ll link to you, if you link to me” – and while not banned they are not regarded as highly as one-off links by the search engines. Paying for links is strictly prohibited and if caught your website could be suspended or permanently blacklisted from the search engines.

The key to getting good links is to create great content that people want to link to, yes it involves hard work, but it will all be worth it when your traffic starts climbing, because your search engine ranking is improving.

Social Media

The amount of social activity that a webpage has on social networks (shares, likes, links, +1s etc.) is an important factor in how that page is ranked by the search engines. Meaning that search engines look to see if other people think your webpage is valuable, or interesting, enough to share. All new content published should be shared across all of your social platforms. You should also make it as easy as possible for visitors to share your content, by having all of the relevant share buttons for each of the networks embedded on every page.

Email

Even with social media, email marketing remains an important part of getting your message out there. Every blog post you publish should be sent to your mailing list and it should be easy for people to sign up to your mailing list from your blog.

By sending notifications of new blog posts, or landing pages announcing an upcoming webinar, for example, you are increasing the potential traffic to your site, and as site traffic is something the search engines take into consideration, it is another vital part of SEO.

Your email should include social media share buttons as well … make it as easy as possible for people to share your content!

Is SEO Worth It?

If all this sounds like a lot of work – that’s because it is. However, without proper SEO, search engines cannot properly crawl your site, understand what it is about, or see if others have shared it. If a search engine doesn’t understand what your site is about, or find good social signals for it, the search engine will not rank your site highly on the results page, meaning your potential clients have no chance of finding you online. If they can’t find you, then they can’t engage in business with you.

Related: The 7 Day SEO Diet

New clients are not an optional part of business, and in today’s online world that means neither is SEO.

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Image: “3d image, Conceptual of Internet web search engine/Shutterstock“

Category: Blogging, Blogs, Branding, e-mail marketing, Facebook, Linkedin, Marketing Strategy, Mobile, online marketing, SEO, social business, social media, Social media Marketing, Twitter

Tags: improve search engine optimisation, search engine marketing, search engine optimisation, search engine optimization, search engine strategy, seo

The Author: Sarah Ryan

Sarah Ryan is an Online Marketing & Communications manager with 7 years experience. After being located in San Francisco for 2 years, Sarah returned to Dublin in early 2012. http://www.sarahryanblog.com

Add Your Comment

shaneoleary1

Is email marketing at all relevant for SEO?
http://www.sarahryanblog.com/ Sarah Ryan

Hi Shane
Email marketing is relevant, as all your emails should contain a CTA that links back to a landing page on your website. Your landing page should have share icons, and shared webpages will improve your SEO, and of course your emails will send more traffic to your website, and traffic impacts SEO as well.
Thanks
Sarah
http://www.smartsolutions.ie/blog/ Elaine Rogers

Hi Sarah,
I love this article, I have learned a few things that I can do very easily for my own website. A well explained article. The difference reminds me of shops, whether you are on main street with a great window display, or on a side street with no display.

Being seen is important, and most importantly non-techie business owners can do a lot for their own website, in small steps as mentioned in your article.

Loved it, thanks!
http://www.hal9000.ie Jennie Molphy

Great overview Sarah.

Worth mentioning also is that even when businesses understand the role of SEO in their marketing mix, it’s often thought of as an add-on, when it would work much better if the site was designed with SEO and the keywords to prioritise in mind.
davidquaid

Hi Sarah,

Well, its a good post – actually the title is spot on. But SEO will be ignored by so many companies over the constant din of those trying to flog social media. And there’s a massive difference between the two. SEO is Sales AND Marketing. It definitely leads to sales. But there are so many bad SEO blog posts that people have the wrong opinion. And actually this particular post doesn’t help…

So, its actually a terrible article – I know that everyone is meant to be super nice to everyone online – but I just can’t stand misinformation. If people are going to publish something, then they need to be able to stand over it…

So here goes:

1. SEO is a strategy, not an activity list, and until that mindset changes we’re just kidding ourselves.
Here’s why: SEO includes everything including domain name selection, hosting provider, content plan, design layout and most importantly: Site Architecture. You also have to know your markets by geography, age, interests etc. You may and probably need more than one website

2. Social media sharing will have little or no impact on SEO at all and it should NEVER be listed as so. In fact, people who claim this need to be brought to task. Yes, your social network’s sharing history will be shown in a SERP result when and where it’s happened and ONLY if you are are logged in and ONLY if Google can make a connection but it in no way at influences the ranking engine – which, oddly, you’ve listed as an “important factor”

3. Link swapping is actually “banned”, and more specifically it goes against the ToS and will result in a penalty where Google’s software is able to tell beyond any doubt and the penalty will remain in place until the problem is rectified. Where the penalty is manual, it can be indefinite.

The stats for SEO, ROI are much more impressive – and Google have some great data which you should consider including. Firstly, social media traffic makes up just 10% of all web traffic = the number one reason why SEO is critical as Google makes up 88% of Irish and UK traffic and search makes up to 90% of US Traffic

4. Most social traffic is actually based around Youtube, which accounts for 25% of all Social Media traffic.

5. Of the top five most installed apps in the world on smart phones, 3 are owned by Google!

SEO isn’t a lot of work as much as its about doing the right work. Page Titles are not the start, middle or end of SEO. Page Titles should be the result of a carefully laid out plan.

I’ve no problems with people guessing about the future of social media but posts like this are, in my humble opinion, dangerous at best. A little knowledge can do a lot of damage.
http://www.sarahryanblog.com/ Sarah Ryan

Hi Elaine
Thanks for reading. Glad you found some tips you can easily action for your own website. Even the smallest of changes can make a huge difference!
http://www.sarahryanblog.com/ Sarah Ryan

Hi Jennie
I completely agree! Far better to put all the best SEO practices in place from the very beginning. However, if you have a site already in existence, with poor SEO in place, there is still a lot that can be done to improve it .. it will just take some time and effort.
http://www.sarahryanblog.com/ Sarah Ryan

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{page:Section1;}Good
morning David

I’m
sorry to hear that you felt the post was ‘dangerous’. It is, as stated, a basic
guide to SEO to allow people with limited knowledge to get some of the basics
such as url addresses and tags right. You are of course correct that SEO is a
strategy, and as discussed below, is something that would be far better served
to be put in place before a website was created, however given that some people
are trying to do this retro actively, the above pointers should help them
improve their SEO to a certain extent, and yes domain name selection is very
important – in fact a good domain name can actually compensate for a lot of
other SEO failures – but, as I say a lot of people are not in the fortunate
position where they are starting from scratch. Social Media sharing does have
an impact on SEO, I’m not sure why you say it doesn’t, if you look at SEOMoz’s
article, as one example, it says that social media signals will only increase
in importance for SEO (http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors).
With regards your comment that link swapping is “banned” if you look at
Google’s page on the subject (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356)
you will see that they are referring specifically to spamming or excessive link
exchanges, not to once off relevant link swaps, which is what I was talking
about, although perhaps I wasn’t explicit enough in that sentence.

I
hope I have addressed your concerns with the article. As mentioned it is a
basics guide, and is actually much longer than most blog posts on this site, if
I was to cover everything necessary for a great SEO strategy we would have
needed a book, not a blog post, and I will leave the SEO book writing to
others
http://www.sarahryanblog.com/ Sarah Ryan

Good morning David

I’m
sorry to hear that you felt the post was ‘dangerous’. It is, as stated, a basic
guide to SEO to allow people with limited knowledge to get some of the basics
such as url addresses and tags right. You are of course correct that SEO is a
strategy, and as discussed below, is something that would be far better served
to be put in place before a website was created, however given that some people
are trying to do this retro actively, the above pointers should help them
improve their SEO to a certain extent, and yes domain name selection is very
important – in fact a good domain name can actually compensate for a lot of
other SEO failures – but, as I say a lot of people are not in the fortunate
position where they are starting from scratch. Social Media sharing does have
an impact on SEO, I’m not sure why you say it doesn’t, if you look at SEOMoz’s
article, as one example, it says that social media signals will only increase
in importance for SEO (http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors).
With regards your comment that link swapping is “banned” if you look at
Google’s page on the subject (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356)
you will see that they are referring specifically to spamming or excessive link
exchanges, not to once off relevant link swaps, which is what I was talking
about, although perhaps I wasn’t explicit enough in that sentence.

I
hope I have addressed your concerns with the article. As mentioned it is a
basics guide, and is actually much longer than most blog posts on this site, if
I was to cover everything necessary for a great SEO strategy we would have
needed a book, not a blog post, and I will leave the SEO book writing to
others.
davidquaid

No “traffic” is not good for SEO. Irrelevant traffic is damaging to CTR for both SEO and PPC – and will slowly kill you. Google aims to punish sites for getting irrelevant traffic”

Secondly, how would Direct traffic influence search?

This is nonsense!
http://www.sarahryanblog.com/ Sarah Ryan

David

Again, I would point you to SEOMoz where you can see that the amount of traffic a website gets does indeed have an affect –> http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors.
davidquaid

Again, my problem with your post is that you said, specifically:

“The amount of social activity that a webpage has on social networks (shares, likes, links, +1s etc.) is an important factor in how that page is ranked by the search engines”

This is patently untrue and Google have a direct response on this.

The problem with quoting seoMoz, and the point about Social Media signals being more important isnt related to your comment, is that seoMoz are just guessing about it themselves – they don’t know exactly what Google does and they certainly don’t claim that Google uses social media to rank or measure importance, because it really doesn’t. In fact, almost all social media networks are “nofollow” to reduce spam. That’s at the crux of this – people using social media as a link building exercise is hugely damaging and if you re-read your post, thats the conclusion one would draw.

No you haven’t addressed any of my concerns, you just pretended you were making a different point.
davidquaid

Hi Sarah, thanks for linking to the survey that I participated in. Please note that the statement is “Page level social media influence”

These are the results of what SEO people think will be important down the road. Nowhere does it state that Social Media influences ranking at all. Yes, social media is an important part of an SEO strategy – from the point of view of visitor retention, recycling non-engaged traffic, extending views. But not for ranking.
http://www.squidoo.com/seo-experts-the-best-in-the-world The Best SEO Experts

Great list, but I’d like to add to what you said about internal links. Google is penalizing so-called “duplicate content” now more than ever, and it’s important to use a variety of different words as anchor text. That means, for one thing, you’ve got to use more than just your target keywords. LSI is extremely important. However, you need to use some seemingly non-relevant terms as well, like “click here” and “more info.” Google is actually starting to penalize people for spam when all of their backlinks come from their relevant words. Seems crazy, but that’s apparently what they’ve decided is a good way to root out spammers.
http://www.seocontentwriters.co/ James Watson

I think the social media can do more for your ranking in search engine because it opens the door for your website.

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Tweak Your Biz » Marketing » Why SEO Is Not Optional – A Back To Basics Guide

Why SEO Is Not Optional – A Back To Basics Guide