7 Essential Steps for SEO Success

SEO is like PR for your website. Get more people to visit your site by following these seven inside tips.

Search engine optimization—SEO—is one of the top ways to attract visitors to your website. Millions of people use search engines like Google and Bing each day, and if your site isn't optimized for search, you're missing out on countless potential customers.

By doing some SEO—think of it as PR for search engines—you boost the odds that your site will be found, and increase your product or service's visibility. Ready to get started? Here are seven essential steps.

1. Keyword Research: People are searching for your products and services, but they may be using words you're not anticipating. That's where keyword research comes in. It allows you to understand the ways your customers are searching. For example, if you sell footwear, you might assume people are searching for your products using that word. But are they also using other words?

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool can show you this. You can enter a word and see how often people search for that word and related ones. Using the tool, I can discover that people do search for "footwear"—30 million searches per month for that word. But nearly 70 million are using the word "shoes." That's important to understand, because if you're only talking about "footwear" on your site, you may be missing all those people interested in "shoes."

2. Good Content: Once you understand what people are searching for, you can then ensure you have quality content that matches. For example, say that you sold strollers and saw that there was interest in an "all-terrain" type. Do you have a page about them? If not, that's content you might want to create. 

There's a difference between just using a word over and over in copy and having great content about a topic. Great content adds value, and helps inform and guide readers. 

Just having a dedicated page listing your all-terrain strollers might be enough. That's as much SEO as writing copy for the page. But you can go beyond merely selling or listing items by offering advice that may help you gain search engine visibility.

3. Accessibility: Once your content is online, can the search engines actually find it? Search engines need to be able to "crawl" your website and locate pages that they can add to their searchable "book" or "index" of the Web. It's possible to block them without realizing this. Here's a fast, easy test to tell.

4. Health Check: Closely related to accessibility, there are ways you can check on the "health" of your site, in terms of SEO. Two leading ways are free and trustworthy, offered by the search engines themselves. 

5. Build Links: One of the primary ways search engines decide which pages should rank well is by looking at links to those pages. Content that has high-quality links pointing at it gets a boost.

Unfortunately, when people hear this, they often go about building links the wrong way. They think it's all about getting many links, rather than important ones. They may try to buy links, assuming that's an easy method. They may try building sheer numbers of links themselves, by dropping them in comments on blogs or into forum posts, regardless of whether they're relevant.

6. Be Social: There is one legitimately easy way to earn those hard links—by being social. Get your site on Twitter, Facebook and especially Google+. Share your content through these and other appropriate social channels. In turn, your followers may share it with others. All that sharing is a "social signal" that search engines are beginning to use to help understand what's good content.

7. Be an Author: Google has a system called "Authorship" that allows you to link a page back to your Google+ account. Why bother? For one, it allows you to have your image appear next to stories you've authored. It also allows you to see how popular stories are on Google that you have created across a wide range of sites.

Source: http://goo.gl/ZsF4Ck