Picture yourself crawling through the Amazon looking for your next meal. You are stepping over fallen trees, leaping over small puddles, and the air is thick and humid. Your body has been sweating since the sun came up and it feels like you have an extra layer of skin because you are covered in a coat of mud. You are holding your spear above you right shoulder, looking around, taking in everything. Every branch that snaps causes your head to quickly inspect the vicinity in hope that it could be something to bring back to your family. You hear the echo of a howler monkey howling in the distance. You all of a sudden see something from a far which looks like a Tapir. You quietly get closer to it, trying everything possible to not scare the tapir off. You get within a good distance and dial in. You pull back the spear, and are just about to fling it as hard as you can. Your heart is pounding, your starting to feel a rush of adrenaline. You squint your eyes and tighten your grip on the spear. You take a deep breath and let it out slowly. You breathe once more, but when your lungs are filled up, you launch the spear at the tapir. The spear makes perfect contact and the tapir collapses. You feel an instant feeling of relief because you can finally feed your family that hasn’t been able to have a real meal for the past three days.

You might be thinking, “What could this possibly have to do with search engine optimization?”. Well, picture the tapir as SEO (search engine optimization). The tapir represents the dinner or the goal that you hope to accomplish. SEO is the goal that you hope to accomplish and when you have mastered it, it will lead to higher traffic, which then will lead to more leads, which then will lead to more conversions, which will then lead to money in the bank. So sit tight. Sharpen your spear (or pencil) because I am going to teach you how to kill (in the sense of making a markedly favorable impression) SEO.

So what in god’s green earth is SEO? SEO is the practice of improving and promoting a website to increase traffic from search engines. Search engines are brilliant. But they are not that brilliant. You have to spoon feed them. In the past I have blogged about this, and talked about how you can’t put a steak in front of a 2 year-old and expect them to cut it up, and then eat it. You have to cut it up for them into pieces that they can consume. The same can be said about search engines, they need their information cut-up for them. Search engines have two major functions: crawling and building an index, and providing search users with a ranked list of the websites they’ve determined are the most relevant.

Moz created a beautiful eBook on Search Engine Optimization. The eBook is packed with information pertaining to how search engines operate, how people interact with search engines, keyword usage, and much much much more. Moz is really strutting their stuff when it comes to SEO, they got it down to the T. Since their eBook is quite hefty, I am going to talk about some of the key principles of SEO.

Search Engine Optimization matters. Like really, really, really matters. In 2011, ComScore conducted a study on search engines and found that Americans conducted 20.3 billion searches in one month. WHAT? Those searchers are trying to find website’s like yours, and if they are not successful, they are going to your competitors.

To perform healthy, wholesome, GMO-free search engine optimization, you want to make sure you do a number of things. One of those being indexable content. To perform fantastically in search engine listings, your most important content should be in HTML text format. Crawlers are not able to identify images, flash files, and java applets. So for images, provide alt text. For flash and java plug-ins, add text on the page. If you do not provide text for the crawler to scan, they will get to your page, and all of your valuable information will be invisible. You can also provide a transcript from the videos you have on your site since crawlers will not be able to press play and take notes on your video.

If you feel like you are not the best at indexable content, then you can use a variety of tools to make sure that your content is able to be read by search engines. One of the most popular tools is Google Cache. This tool allows you to see what elements are visible, and what elements are invisible.

Beware: you may be shocked to see that your content is invisible to search engines.

Another important aspect of SEO is keyword usage and targeting. A big portion of SEO is keywords. But a lot of people thought that you could just put a bunch of keywords at the bottom of a post, or in the middle of a post to get high search rankings (they call this “stuffing”). Bing, Google, and Yahoo! caught onto this and made it so that they can detect when you perform this Tom Foolery, and if they do catch you they will lower your site ranking, and sometimes not even show your site. One of the best ways to optimize a page’s rankings is to ensure that they keywords you want to rank for are prominently used in titles, text, and metadata.

When you make your keywords more specific, you narrow the competition for search results, and improve your chances of achieving a higher ranking. For example, If you were selling a men’s Helmut Lang jacket and someone typed into Google, “men’s coat”, there is a high probability that it wont be seen. But say that same searcher types in, “Helmut Lang jacket men’s” there is higher chance that your site will be ranked higher and be seen.

Moz also created an awesome eBook called The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building. The concept of link building is basically having other websites include hyperlinks back to your website. The search engines are crawling through millions of sites and the more websites that give credit, or link back to your site, shows that you are a credible site. There are different ways to get websites to post hyperlinks back to your site. One way to do this is by connecting with industry colleagues. You can have them post “badges” on their site that say something along the lines of, “Check out our industry partners”. Another way is to produce GREAT content. By creating original, organic, home-grown valuable content you are increasing your chances of people sharing your content, quoting your content, and/ or using your content in their blog posts. This shows that you created this content are a valuable asset in the industry.

Moz brought up a lot of great ideas on how to perform effect link building. But one idea that they suggested that really stuck with me was the idea of guest blogging. This concept is great because it brings traffic to your site, as well as, tells the search engines that you are a credible site. Especially if you are able to get someone influential (look up their Klout score via Hootsuite!) to blog. That influential person will mention on their site that they did a guest blog post on your site, and by doing that it will send their traffic your way.

Search engine optimization really matters, it is not just a fad. In this blog post I have talked about some of the principles of search engine optimization and link building. I strongly encourage you to check out the eBook’s that I have referenced, especially if you want to become an SEO pro. Until next time my fellow smarketer…

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