SEO: The Only 3 Things You Need To Know
By Anna Johnson on October 25th, 2010For search engine optimization (SEO) professionals, SEO is literally a full time occupation, which means there is really no end to what you can do to help boost your rankings in the search engines.
At the same time, however, effective SEO is not necessarily about doing lots of different things… it’s typically about doing a lot of a few important things. In fact, you really only need to do three (3) things really well to get high rankings in the search engines.
Just think in terms of “keywords, contents and links”:
1. Keywords
Target the right keywords for your web pages, with the help of an appropriate keyword tool (link).
2. Content
Optimize your web pages for those keywords. This means two things: (a) including those keywords in the title tags and content of your pages and (b) providing great content that both your audience and key influencers (i.e. people likely to link to your content) love and are therefore likely to share and link to.
3. Links
Attract links to your web pages. This could mean pro-actively approaching other websites for links to your content, or, as indicated above, creating such wonderful content that other sites – ideally authoritative sites – link to it. You can also ‘plant’ links by creating other websites, blogs, social media accounts, etc that link back to your site, although that’s rarely as good as creating great content.
Okay, so it’s much, much easier to say “keywords, content and links” than to actually target the right keywords, create compelling content, and attract authoritative links! But you can probably see that SEO is not conceptually difficult. What makes it difficult is the skill and effort involved in doing those three things well.
And, as often is the case, it’s not knowing what to do (the skill bit) that holds most online businesses back from increasing their search engine rankings… it’s doing it (the effort bit). So… if you can frame your approach to SEO in terms of “keywords, content and links” and are willing to do the work, you’ll likely see results.
October 25th, 2010 at 8:11 am
Great post, content being the most important in my opinion. Sometimes we forget the basics and try to get to technical with things.
October 27th, 2010 at 4:18 pm
I have a transportation website and I’ve been reading tons and tons of seo strategies. Also, purchased a couple of seo software.
And I can’t get my site to rank on page #1 in google for the following keywords:
1. Miami Orlando bus
2. Miami airport shuttle
3. Port miami shuttle
4. fort lauderdale shuttle
5. Orlando airport shuttle
Any help, I will highly appreciated.
thanks.
October 27th, 2010 at 4:21 pm
Also, I forgot to mention.
I have a question for following this article.
3 things you need to know:
1. Keywords: I got it
2. Content: How to write good content for a transportation site?
3. Link: will follow.
SO the question is: How to write good content?
Thank you once again
October 27th, 2010 at 6:37 pm
Hi Gustavo, do a search or browse the Kikabink News archive for tons of information, advice, tips, etc about SEO, content, etc. Also check out ourInternet Marketing Search Engine for information beyond what is on our site. When it comes to writing good content… are you a good writer? If not, you may need to hire this out. In short, your aim is to write content that (1) appeals to your target market i.e. is interesting and well-written and therefore likely to be shared and linked-to and (2) includes the keywords you’re targeting for the relevant webpage.
October 28th, 2010 at 1:40 pm
Anna, thank you very much for your input. I am going to search the kikabink news for any tips of advice in regards to SEO. By the way, I registered to the newsletter and hope to keep in touch.
October 28th, 2010 at 6:34 pm
Terrific Gustavo. Feel free to contribute further questions as we may be able to address them in future articles.