Search Engine Marketing and Good SEO

Good SEO and search engine marketing is the marketing technique that most people find the most mysterious. Of all the marketing technique available online and offline, SEO is the least understood and likely also the least well done.

That has partially to do with the secrecy of the search engines, partially with those that claim to be experts in the subject and partially with the hint of witchcraft, with talk of white hat and black hat techniques as though search engine marketing was some form of black art. Nothing could be further from the truth, and SEO is a highly logical approach to search engine listings that anybody could do for themselves.

What are Search Engines?

First, let’s have a look at search engines and basically how they work using Google as an example (because Google is the largest with around 80% of the world’s searches).

Google regards its main function as providing a good service for its customers: those using the search engine to find information. To do that it scans billions of web pages seeking keywords and the relevance of the page to these keywords: basically it provides top listings to those web pages it believes offers its customers the most relevant information on the search term (keyword) they have used.

The keywords Google is seeking on your web pages are the same or related search terms to those Google users are using to find their information, and Google determines that relevance by means of algorithms, or mathematical formulae, that use preset rules to calculate the relevance or worth of the page to searchers. The results might not include the exact search term used since Google will also list pages with contextually relevant vocabulary ( a hunt for ‘dogs’ might also bring up pages focusing on ‘puppies’).

What search engine marketing involves is optimizing a web page to meet the requirements of these algorithms and attain as high a search engine listing as possible. A page #1 listing can bring a web page a huge amount of free, organic traffic as compared to traffic that is paid for. On any Google results page, the organic traffic appears on the left and the paid adverts appear on the right of the page – sometimes one or two paid adverts will also appear the top of the left hand list.

Search Engine Optimization

In search engine optimization, each page must be optimized individually, because Google lists pages individually rather than entire websites. There are some easy things to do before you have to consider more complex ways of optimizing your site.

Basic SEO involves checking the HTML in the Head section of your web page. Each page must be optimized to one keyword, or search term. Let’s assume that is Reiki Masters. Your page title must be Reiki Masters, so include that term in the TITLE tag in the Head HTML. Also start your Description Meta tag with the same keyword, such as in “Reiki Masters: Learn reiki and become a reiki master”.

These are the two good SEO changes you can make in the Head section: the others are largely irrelevant, though you should also use the same term in the keyword Meta tag. The contents of the Head section are not seen by humans, only by search engine spiders, so the page title that is seen should come in the Body section, and contained in H1 tags thus:

(H1)Reiki Masters(/H1), but use the html tags rather than brackets – I cannot use them in case anybody has their emails set to HTML format. Any other mention of Reiki Masters as a title should also be enclosed in H1 tags, and other subheadings should be enclosed in H2 heading tags.