FindYourSearch - An Intro to SEO

FindYourSearch is an online advertising company that focuses on establishing and improving online exposure for their clients. This is achieved by providing Web pages specialized for search engines and creating blogs specific to each client. We do everything we can in order to make sure our clients get what they need to improve their business.

This hub is designed to provide an introduction to the field of SEO. You'll find basic information on how the process of search engine optimization works as well as some things you can apply to your sites and hubs right away. Topics include how SEO works, video and image optimization, and the relationship between SEO and social media.

In addition to Hubpages, you can also find the company among the Web's most popular social websites where people can communicate and ask questions. Feel free to contact us or leave a comment here if you have any questions or concerns about anything related to our field, and be sure to check out our website for more info on who FindYourSearch is as a company.

Search engine optimization, commonly known as SEO for short, is quite simply the practice of making websites look appealing to search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. This helps your website by increasing the chance that people will find your site in natural or “organic” searches for relevant terms. It also helps searchers by matching them with sites which are relevant to their queries that would otherwise be buried far under millions of other sites on the Web. Even search engines appreciate sites which have been optimized because they help the engines to serve up relevant content to their users. Google has actually written its own SEO starter guide (see the next section for a link).

In an ideal world, search engines would be able to easily and perfectly detect the content and value of every site on the Web, regardless of their formatting, URL structure, or whether anyone has noticed the site exists. Unfortunately, search engines are simply sophisticated software which cannot make value judgments as a human would. Instead, they must rely on detailed algorithms which attempt to rank sites according to relevance based on hundreds of factors. Everything from site speed to text content to links back to the site in question is considered as the engines attempt to discern the relative value of a site in relation to a query.

Sites whose owners have no idea how search engines work are unfortunately often at a severe disadvantage. Indecipherable code, poor site structure, and unfocused or badly written content are just a few of the common pitfalls into which unsuspecting site owners frequently fall. The search engines place these sites low in value and they become impossible to find except by a direct link. Site owners wonder why they aren’t getting any traffic, but rather than engaging in marketing and SEO techniques, they often write off their sites as failed ventures. In fact, all they usually need is a bit of optimization.

The first step in any quality SEO campaign is keyword research. During this phase, hundreds of keywords are considered in terms of relevance, frequency searched, and competition. Many tools exist for gathering and delving deep into keyword data, the most popular of which being Google’s AdWords Keyword tool. After hours of research, the keywords which are likely to have the highest ROI (return on investment) for your business are chosen and the next stage can begin.

Copy writing, the process of writing the text on a page, usually takes place next. Keywords are strategically placed throughout the content, maintaining a balance between frequency and over-stuffing. Longer copy can inadvertently target thousands of “long tail” keywords, those which are less frequently searched individually but which nonetheless can account for massive amounts of traffic when taken as a whole.

Each page on the site will then be optimized. Text placed in H1 and H2 header tags is assumed to be the most important theme on your page, so these should often include keywords. Anchor text, text which has been made into links, also plays a huge role in what the search engines see as important. Meta tags should be considered next. While these were once important, they are now worth very little. The keywords meta tag is discounted by all modern search engines entirely due to extreme abuse in the early days of the Internet. The description tag is still useful, but mainly because it is often shown as a page’s short description on search engine results pages (called SERPs for short) when people find your site there; it has very little SEO benefit strictly speaking. Nevertheless, a good description can increase the likelihood of click-throughs when you do show up on search, so don't ignore it.

Important factors in site-wide SEO include directory structure and navigation. Both should be intuitive to users and search engines alike. For instance, a page about shoes on the fictional website “example.com” would be better off at “example.com/clothes/shoes” than “example.com/p25/product?=sJcl”. Each individual page’s URL should also be human-readable and preferably include a keyword; never create URLs filled with numbers and symbols if you can avoid it.

These basic on-site SEO steps are only the beginning. Once the site itself is optimized, the process of link building begins. Nearly every search engine algorithm today takes into account how many other sites link back to a page. These links are basically seen as votes in favor of a page, with votes by relevant and influential sites being given more weight than votes by irrelevant, unknown, or unsavory sites. The link building process often causes SEO to overlap with marketing and public relations at this point, since the best way to build natural, high-powered links is to become involved in communities.

In addition to optimizing the text and code of a website, a bit of work should be spent on optimizing images and video. Properly optimized images and video can not only strengthen the SEO of the page they are on, but also rank in their own right on image and video searches, potentially drawing links or traffic to your site as people find it through your images in search. These elements themselves cannot be seen by search engines in the way you and I see them, so special care must be taken in order to get full value out of them.

The most basic optimization step in either image or video is to name the file something relevant and targeted. “Image1.jpg” won’t do you any good; “vacation-to-vancouver.jpg”, on the other hand, is much more descriptive. Filling the corresponding alt tag with “vacation to vancouver” will further strengthen the image for that phrase. As a side note, alt tags should always be implemented, even aside from SEO concerns. They are a validation requirement and help users with slow connections or poor vision to continue to navigate your site. Never name or tag an image something egregiously long or unrelated to the actual subject of the image, however; this is just another form of keyword stuffing and likely to get your site penalized by the search engines.

Text surrounding your images or video is particularly important, so it helps to add carefully written descriptions near them and allow comments. Comments won’t be crafted by you, of course, but they can add further context and often help you target those long tail keywords mentioned above. For videos, adding a transcription nearby is probably one of the most valuable SEO steps you can take. This time consuming process can be automated as long as you are willing to edit the machine-generated content for correctness. YouTube recently added a built-in captioning service, which has been confirmed to be read by the YouTube search engine crawler.

Whenever adding images or video to a site, it is important to remember that search engines see nothing but a black box in their place. Crawlers rely on context and tags to understand what they are encountering as anything more than “some kind of image” or “a video of some sort”. Fortunately, adding content to help the search engines understand these elements also usually helps the user as well - captions help the hearing impaired, alt tags help those with screen-readers or slow connections, and transcriptions help users with time or bandwidth constraints.

As mentioned above, one of the best ways to build natural links is to become involved in communities. The Web has a wealth of communities from which to choose, including blogs, forums, article sites (like Hubpages), and micro-blogging sites (like Twitter). It is important for businesses to find which are right for them.

An oft-recommended tactic for social marketing is blog commenting. This consists of simply finding blogs in relevant niches, reading some articles there, and adding your own comments. Some blogs provide “followed” links for comments. Followed links from around the Web boost your search engine rankings, but this is only the most narrow benefit -- especially as most blogs have “no-follow” tags on their links, removing virtually all direct SEO benefit. The same is true of most forums - while occasionally one can be found which leaves forum signatures and posts followed, the vast majority of them do not. However, commenting on blogs and joining forums in relevant niches have many other benefits, including:

• Exposure for the brand by inclusion in a relevant, (hopefully) supportive community
• Increased Traffic from people who want to find out more about the post author
• Relationship building with the members of the community and potentially blog authors themselves

All these things can lead to backlinking and perhaps even an invitation to guest post, both of which have a direct impact on SEO.

Article sites like Hubpages allow businesses to spread their messages and their brands to entirely new audiences. Writing quality content and including strategically-placed links will impress readers, grow traffic, and build backlinks. Starting a micro-blog stream on a site such as Twitter or Identi.ca further spreads the message of the brand and its reach into targeted communities. Engaging in conversation is essential in this strategy, as is providing value to your posts. No one likes an inhuman-seeming spam-bot, but most people don’t care what you ate for lunch, either! There's a fine line between showing humanity and avoiding too much "fluff". It is especially important when engaging in both these types of marketing not to appear spammy, otherwise the your reputation may be damaged and the links will be devalued, removing all potential benefits and actually doing harm.

Using some or all of these social media outlets can help spread your brand, build backlinks, and strengthen relationships with others in your field. Businesses must be careful to have someone with a strong understanding of marketing and community management heading up their social media campaign in order to reap the full benefits and avoid potentially damaging pitfalls.

Above all, don't get discouraged. Like most worthwhile endeavors, SEO takes time. It must be a consistent effort over time, and will take weeks to months before it really begins to pay off. However, always remember that the benefits of good, organic SEO are worth the wait. To have customers arrive at your website after searching relevant keyphrases is one of the surest ways to get conversions. After all, who is more likely to interact with your product or service than someone who is actively searching for it? Optimize your landing pages for conversions and get ready for your new organic traffic, and you'll be very glad you invested in SEO.

Got questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you. Leave a comment here or interact with FindYourSearch by checking us out on other social sites for the latest news and updates. We can be found on Twitter, Facebook, and more, including the FindYourSearch Squidoo lens. Just check us out anywhere online to keep in touch!

You can also see the SEO images used here at full size on our FindYourSearch Flickr page. We gave them a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license, so feel free to use them in your own work with a link back to our Flickr page.

And remember, if you found this hub useful, please give us a vote at the bottom of this article, that way others are more likely to find it as well. Thanks, and best of luck to you as you explore the world of SEO!