What is SEO?

Quite often I have friends who ask me, “what is SEO?” I know a lot of my friends visit this site so I figure it would be best to address this issue here.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a form of Internet Marketing. My job and passion in its most basis sense is to influence the search engines (mainly Google) into showing clients websites at the top of search results. I rarely (if ever) focus on branded phrases. The main focus with SEO and Search Engine Optimization in general is to focus on basic phrases and keywords that humans actually search for. Chances are that if someone searches for, lets say “Asics,” the Asics shoe company website will already rank in Google. This generally holds true with other less popular brands. The keywords and phrases we would focus on for a client such as Asics would be phrases like:

• athletic shoes
• running shoe
• tennis shoes
• women’s athletic shoes
• tennis shoe
• men’s running shoes

You get the point. There are a plethora of tools out there to help pick the best keywords and phrases to target when you’re doing SEO. Some of these tools are paid and some are free. I mainly use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool because it is not only free, but provides the actual search volume (the number of people who search for a term). In addition to this free data it gives based on the keywords and phrases you enter, it also gives you the option to have other keywords related to those terms and other terms to consider. Another piece of information that can be helpful is the data it shows on how competitive a phrase is in Google AdWords. In other words, how many others are advertising for those keywords.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

After you enter your keywords (or phrases if you must), Google then graciously offers you other keywords worth considering:

Google AdWords Keyword Tool Gives Suggestions

It is extremely important to note how many keyword ideas Google will offer you. By entering only 6 keywords, Google gave me data for 800! And the best part about it all, the data is free:

Google AdWords Keyword Tool's Additional Keywords

By doing a little research, you can VERY easily see what people search for in Google and how many people do each month. Instead of thinking you know what people search for or what best describes your business or products, you can see what people search for. If you want to have a successful presence on the Internet and get traffic to your site, this is honestly the easiest way to do it.

After we have a list of keywords compiled, we look for ways to target those phrases on our clients websites. Sometimes we have to build more pages and content out on the sites and other times the content already exists. After we find the content that we want to “optimize,” we sometimes re-write the content so that those keywords are included in the copy. We also optimize the page title, headings, and meta tags within the site. Below is an example of a Google search for “seo kent ohio” that shows the page title and one of the most important meta tags, the meta description:

Google Search Results Example

The reason I say the meta description is one of the most important is because this is what the user reads when on Google. If the copy for the meta description is enticing, you can influence the user to click your site in the SERP’s (search engine result pages). When optimizing the page title, we throw in a few keywords we want to target.

I’ll continue to add on to this section of my site in the future with some more SEO basics. But in a nutshell, that right there explains the basic premise of SEO and Search Engine Optimization.

If you’re in the Columbus, Ohio area and want some free SEO advice, I would be more than happy to give you some tips.