What Is SEO?
SEO is an acronym for 'Search Engine Optimisation'. It's essentially a constantly evolving study of what factors the search engines take into account when they 'rank' you in their natural search listings.
'Natural' search listings are the main lists of results that come up when you search for something. These do not include the paid listings (often referred to as PPC - Pay Per Click.)
In this screen-grab from a Google search you can see the paid listings in the right column and in the yellow box at the top. The 'natural' listings are straight from Google's main index and show sites listed in the order of importance and relevance according to their algorithm.
Obviously, we want to be as high up the page(s) as possible. If we're the 7th listing on page 23 - we're hardly going to get prospects beating our door down!
No-one knows all the factors that Search Engines (SE's) use to determine your rank. The SE's really don't want anyone to know - so you can't manipulate the system. So, over the years an industry has grown up around this - using empirical testing and measuring of various factors to determine which ones are the most important.
There are two sides to SEO: 'On-Page' factors & 'Off-Page' factors. There are also 'off-web' factors such as demographic and geographic information - but we have no control over this area.
'On-Page' SEO
On-Page SEO is all about changes you can make directly to a site to make it more search engine friendly. This is the easiest part and involves correctly setting up internal-linking, title & header tags, seeding keywords in appropriate places, and to some lesser degree, using meta-tags. If all that is complete double-dutch to you, then don't worry - you're not alone! There are numerous E-Books & Forums which explain the principles of 'on-page' SEO in some depth.
The bottom-line though, is that while it is the easiest to control, it has the LEAST affect on your ranking for most sites. Many years ago, you used to be able to dupe the SE's with lots of on-page factors - but that's been completely closed down now.
The only time that 'on-page' becomes important is when you have taken care of 'off-page' and have a lot of inbound links to create some authority. At that point, careful tweaking of on-page factors (and in particular, internal linking) can yield some good results.
'Off-Page' SEO
Off-Page SEO is what's important for the vast majority of sites. Imagine it as a 'voting' system. If another site places a link to your site then that site has given you a vote of confidence. They're saying, "Look at them - they've got something interesting to say..."
The link to your site has two main parts - the actual URL or web address of the page they are pointing someone to, and the 'anchor text' or 'keyword phrase' that is highlighted for you to click. If the search engines see the line:
"Visit our site for the very best in blue fluffy widgets."
...then they see one 'vote' cast. Although you can't see what the link points to (unless you hover over it with your mouse pointer - then it should show at the bottom of your browser window), you can see that the text 'blue fluffy widgets' is clearly important - because that is the anchor text.
So... We now have a vote for that linked web page based on the 'blue fluffy widgets' phrase.
i.e. one vote towards this site appearing higher in the natural listings when we type "blue fluffy widgets" into the search box.
This always works like this - the anchor text and page pointed to are irrevocably tied together. You can't create a vote for a page without some highlighted anchor text (and let's not get into image-linking right now - we're trying to explain the concept,) and that anchor text is what the SE's use to tell them what that page is about and what it should show up under when searched for. Let's say that again - because it's VERY important...
The Anchor Text Controls Which Searches You Would Appear For
Therefore, to continue with the previous example, if the line was, "Visit our site for the very best in blue fluffy widgets" then you'd just have created a vote for 'Visit our site', rather than 'blue fluffy widgets'. Can you see the problem?
There is an often quoted classic example of this, and that's the "Click HERE for more information..." phrase.
In this example, we've created a vote for the phrase 'Click HERE'. Who in their right mind would type in "click here" in the search box to find a site? No-one of course. That is why the anchor text is SO important. It signifies the keyword phrases that you want to rank for. (And by the way, if you DO Google "Click Here", you will generally find the Adobe Reader download site at the top. Is that because Adobe want to rank for 'click here' - of course not - it's just that so many sites have a 'click here to download Adobe Reader' phrase on them, that they're number one for that phrase.)
In other words, the SE's use the anchor text phrase to cast a vote for a page. And doesn't that make sense? Google wants to emulate what a real human being is looking for and would like to find. In a lot of ways it doesn't matter if your page is all about blue fluffy widgets, if all the anchor text phrases that point to you say 'yellow balloons', then 'yellow balloons' is what you'll rank for! That is the vote that is cast. Now it's not as simple as that (of course...) because the SE's also use the page title and wording of the page being pointed at to correlate and refine the results, plus a whole bunch of other factors as well (including how spread-out the sites are that are linking to you) - but the essence of this shows that the single most important factor in SEO is lots of back-links from as many different sites as possible with the correct phrases used as anchor text. (Although, we need to avoid what we call 'over-optimisation' - and have some variety in these phrases - but that will be discussed later. For now, let's keep it simple.)
Ideally, if you want to appear in the natural SE listings for 'blue fluffy widgets' then you want a page that is entitled 'blue fluffy widgets', with a headline and sub head-lines that contain 'blue fluffy widgets' and it should also be mentioned a few times in the text on that page. Then you want lots of external site links that point to that specific page with the anchor text 'blue fluffy widgets'!
Enough with the 'blue fluffy widgets' now, but you get the idea... Picking the keyword phrases that you want to rate for can be an art in itself, but people get too hung up on this. The bottom line is: What does a typical customer of yours type in the search box in order to find your product or service? ...The answers to this question supply the basis of your anchor text keywords!
Obviously, we need to do 'keyword research' to ensure people are actually using the phrases we've chosen and that there are sufficient numbers of searchers to make it commercially worthwhile pursuing that keyword phrase. We're looking for a balance actually; enough people searching that phrase, but not so many as to make it overly difficult to rank for. Which brings us on to...
Some Important Words Of Caution...
Do Not Use Phrases That Yield Millions & Millions Of Results
In the screen shot at the top of the page, you'll see a search for 'Car Insurance' - which has 70 million results. I don't know about you, but I don't want to try and compete with 70 million other pages when I'm just starting out!
But... If I typed in "Southampton Car Insurance" (assuming I was a car insurance provider in Southampton) - then there are around 300,000 results. A big number still it seems - but actually quite a small number when it comes to web searches.
I would have a far better chance of getting ranked for that phrase quickly than I would for just 'car insurance'. In fact, if I wanted to rate for phrases like 'Car Insurance' it would probably take years and some seriously deep pockets, as I would be competing with the insurance giants - not a wise choice at all!
Therefore, we're looking for phrases that yield less overall results - but quite accurately sum up what we do or the product/service we offer. In the industry, we often call these 'long-tail' searches - they contain multiple keywords and return less competitive results than primary keyword searches. Depending on how competitive your market is, the phrases could be from 2 to 7 words long. Typically they will be 3 or 4 words long. But, the term 'long tail' has nothing really to do with the length of the keyword phrase; it relates purely to it's search competitiveness.
We normally recommend performing SEO on phrases that return no more than 500,000 to 1 million results at the start. And ideally we should be doing in-depth research on the 1st 10 Google results for this search - to ensure that we're not competing with pages that are going to be impossible to out-rank (like 'car insurance' for example!) We look at factors like Google PageRank, site age and size, the number of back-links built to that page and site, on-page keyword optimisation for your phrase, and the list goes on.... There are plenty of sites that will teach you the rudimentaries of keyword and market analysis. Check out Market Samurai and Niche Pursuits for good background information.
Then, as we build back-links, we will automatically start to gain some ground on the bigger search phrases, and if we put in enough effort, we can go after those big phrases in 6-12 months. But often, the 'bigger' phrases are not particularly focused, because...
We're Also Looking For Phrases That Demonstrate 'Commercial Intent'
We don't usually want search phrases that are purely for research or information gathering purposes. 'Commercial Intent' means they are phrases that indicate someone is looking to make a purchase or request further information.
If you compare the searches: "golf clubs" and "buy wilson golf clubs in southampton", you can clearly see that the first will be much harder to rank for, has multiple meanings ('clubs' could mean the place where you play - as well as what you whack the ball with!) and is probably more research oriented. The second phrase is clearly someone looking to purchase locally and will be much easier to rank for.
Hopefully, this example will get your mental gears turning...
Build Back-links To Individual Sub-Pages On Your Website As Well
It is also useful and very wise to build back-links to the inner pages of your website, and not just your home page. If you have a couple of category pages for example, which contain links to individual products, then it is worth driving appropriate search terms to those pages too. Don't just create back-links to your home-page.
The SE's are looking more and more at how individual pages on your site are listed and treated. Deep-linking has become absolutely crucial Post-Panda 2011, and it will help massively with stablising your rankings and reduce 'bounce' (or 'The Google Dance' as it's sometimes known!)
You should always try to maintain a balance of 25-50% of your inbound links to the home-page of that site though (smaller sites should have a larger proportion, and larger sites should spread the links deeper.) The rest should be divided up between the inner/sub-pages. Search engines don't like to see masses of links to a sub-page and very few links to the home-page. This isn't natural if you think about the way a website is expected to look.
New Sites & Domains And Keyword URL's
A useful point to remember is that with a newer site/domain (less than a year old) it's generally easier and quicker to get a home-page ranked - than it is to get a sub-page ranked. And having your keyword phrase in the URL is universally acknowledged as a quicker route to getting a decent ranking for your home-page. This is known as using EMD's - or Exact Match Domain-names (or as close to 'exact-match' as is available - like 'WilsonGolfClubsPro.com' for 'Wilson Golf Clubs'.) You'll see this regularly in search results, where marketers have multiple 'micro-sites' which only rank for a few keywords (and contain only a few pages,) and provide information on that one area. They normally feature what we call a 'squeeze page' - which is an information collection form with some sales copy - to create a 'lead' for the business.
You need to be very careful with keyword-optimised EMD URL's though, as Google is increasingly coming down on the advantage this gives. It can also be seen as over-optimisation. Ensure that you deep-link thoroughly if you're using this method. Having all your back-links to your home-page on a keyword-optimised URL is a dead give-away of a small site that is over-optimised. If you have a really small site then create back-links to your 'contact us', 'about us' and 'terms' and 'privacy policy' pages if necessary - just ensure that you create deep-links to avoid over concentration on the home-page.
Over-Optimisation & Google
Over-Optimisation is one other area we should touch on. This really only happens with Google, and results in ranking penalties where they see the fingerprint of SEO 'manipulation'. If you are doing well with a rank and then suddenly drop 40-50 spots over night and then stabilise there - you've probably been penalised. To avoid this, you need to put some variety into your inbound linking phrases and also use 'modifiers' in your site text. If you build 1,000 links and they all anchor with 'large red balloons' and the website is called 'LargeRedBallons.com' with a home-page entitled 'Large Red Balloons' and the sub-title says 'Large Red Balloons' and the first paragraph opens with... yes... you guessed it... 'Large Red Balloons...' then you're going to trip every penalty in the Google book. This isn't natural and has obviously been manipulated to try and rank for 'Large Red Balloons'.
Use a variety of mixed anchors - and make minor modifications over time. For the page and header titles, use 'modifier' words in front of and after the text (and sometimes in-between too.) For example: The page title could be 'Why Large Red Balloons Are Better Than Small Red Balloons' and a sub-heading on the page could be 'The Very Best Large Red Balloons That Money Can Buy'. The first paragraph could open with 'Many people think that large red balloons are pretty, but just think...' etc. Mix it up and keep it sounding natural.
It will also read better and make more sense to the people that really matter - your potential customers.
'Naturalisation' Of Anchor Terms To Avoid Over-Optimisation
We have a 'Naturalisation' option in our Members area. This is designed to automatically protect you from over-optimising your anchor-text; by altering, extended and replacing a percentage of your anchors.
You have the option of adjusting 1/3rd (33%), half (50%) or 2/3rds (67%) of your anchor terms.
The '% Replaced' is the total % of anchors that get 'adjusted' in some way. Of these adjustments, half are used to create 'extended anchors' by adding prefix/suffixes to your current anchors, and the other half are split between domain/brand URL's and generic anchors (click here etc.)
So as an example, if you choose the recommended 'Replace 2/3rds (67%)' option, you get...
1/3rd (33%) of anchors using your exact-match keywords, as entered by you in our members area:
i.e. Weight Loss|Rapid Weight Loss|Fast Weight Loss
Then the 2/3rds (67%) of 'adjusted' anchors... Which are...
1/3rd (33%) of your anchors using 'phrase-match' keywords, (by adding extensions to the exact matches):
i.e Considering Weight Loss|Rapid Weight Loss Examined|Investigating Fast Weight Loss
1/6th (16%) of anchors using root domain URLs:
i.e. weightloss.com (Not the full URL - just the root domain URL.)
1/6th (16%) of anchors using generic terms:
i.e. Click here|Try these out|Check this site out (from many hundreds of variations we have.)
This is a virtually perfect mix; where 2/3 of your anchors are phrase-matched but highly mixed, and 1/3 are mixed away from keywords. We strongly recommend that everyone uses this option.
So... How Should I Set Up My Links?
The best advice for smaller sites is generally to point around 25-50% of the inbound links at the home page and the rest at inner-pages. Quite often, a simple and successful method is to send 50% of your links to the home-page (using 2 different anchor text phrases) and 25% to 2 pages off of your home page.
Example: Imagine we have a site called 'bluefluffywidgets.com'...
- We direct 25% of our inbound links at the home-page with 'blue fluffy widgets' as the anchor and then another 25% of our inbound links at the home-page again with 'fluffy blue widgets' as an alternative anchor (note they have a different word order or emphasis.)
- We then send the next 25% of our links to the 'Fluffy Blue Widgets - Buy Now' sub-page with 'Buy Fluffy Blue Widgets' as the anchor. This page is also linked to from the home-page of our site with a similar anchor text.
- We then do the same with another page linked off of the home-page with the remaining 25%; for example a 'Reviews on Blue Fluffy Widgets' page, again with 'Blue Fluffy Widgets Reviews' as the anchor text.
...You can see this distributes links well and creates a little cluster of link authority around the 'blue fluffy widgets' phrase. This is what we're trying to achieve. It also increases our chances of getting the highly sought-after 'double-indented listing' in Google. (This is where we get two separate listings in the search results, with the second immediately following the first and being indented into the page - adding white space and making it highly visible.)
'Link Authority' or 'Keyword Authority' is created from having multiple inbound links containing the phrases we want to rank for. These anchor keywords need to be varied and not all the same - as this looks unnatural to the search engines. If the search engines see 1,000 links that all say 'blue fluffy widgets' and nothing else, this is obviously artificial. If they had grown 'organically' they would have lots of different anchor text phrases - as different web-masters would have linked to you in different ways.
You also need to build 'Trust-Rank' as well as link/keyword authority. The easiest way to do this is via pass-through linking from high trust (high PR) sites like Squidoo, Hub-Pages, Tumblr, Facebook, MySpace, Wordpress blogs etc.
Mix It Up A Little
Putting 'modifiers' in front of and behind phrases helps to mix things up. Use words like 'buy', 'info', 'discount' , 'review' etc. (whatever is appropriate for your market,) and have links to your home-page which just use your URL ('XYZproducts.com') and your company/site name as the anchor phrase (this helps build on-line 'branding'.)
You could also use some with standard phrases like 'Click Here', 'Try This Out' and 'Check Out This Site' etc. as this is what will happen in the 'real-world'. We have a large list of well over 200 generic phrases, which you could occasionally use to 'blur the edges' of an SEO campaign - and can help prevent keyword over-optimisation. But a lot of this is taken care of when you use our Naturalisation option described above.
The Backlink Banzai 'Members Area'
You submit your URL/Keyword combinations in the 'Members Area' (the tab at the top right of the page) - and it's very easy and intuitive to use. (Our members submission page has been fine-tuned over the last 18 months from members suggestions - most of them completely inexperienced in any kind of SEO - so you needn't worry about that.)
You can divide the links up as you see fit. We impose a maximum limit of 20 different URL and keyword phrase combinations. If you chose to use 5 combination 'slots' for example, then each combination/slot would (randomly) receive approximately 1/5th of the total number of links over the month. Similarly, If you chose 10 slots then each page would receive around 1/10th of the total links over the month.
You can also have multiple slots for 1 URL to change the 'weighting' of the submissions. For example; if you used 16 slots in total and 4 of them were to the same URL, then 25% of your slots have that URL, so 25% of your links will be built on that URL. (Each of those 4 slots could also have different keyword sets if you wish.) As opposed to if you used 16 different URL's, which would mean each URL would receive 1/16th of the total links.
Some More Examples:
To continue the car insurance example above, you could provide 'southampton car insurance' as the home page phrase and an alternative 'car insurance in southampton' (to the same home page URL) to give some variety. Then you could pick a few sub/category or 'offer' pages and provide 1 or 2 (or more) varying phrases as appropriate for each.
You do not have to provide 20 variations. 20 is just the maximum for variety.
You could promote 1 site 'energetically', with 2-3 slots going to the home page (with slightly different anchor texts) and then a few more spread throughout the key pages of a site.
Ideally, you would also send 25%-50% of the overall links to some Web 2.0 properties which are direct-linked to your pages. This will leech 'trust-rank' from these High PR/Trust sites and benefit your rankings. So, maybe 5 slots direct to your site and 5 slots to 5 varied Web 2.0 pages (this could be a Squidoo lens, a Wordpress blog, a tumblr blog, a hubpage and a Facebook profile for example) - all of which have direct links to your site's homepage and 2 sub pages.
Or, you could promote up to 5-10 sites with 1 or 2 links to the home page and others to internal pages. Don't use exactly the same anchor text for all the pages. Try and make the anchor text fit the sub-page as precisely as possible, and make sure it is 'on-message' for that page i.e. it represents what that page is talking about.
You can point multiple slots at a single page for more impact and to change the 'weighting' or distribution percentages, but you should vary the anchor text. On a heavily promoted page, it's wise to have 2 or 3 different anchor texts. Again, this is to keep it looking as natural as possible. In the real world it would be very unlikely that you'd accumulate thousands of back-links from different sites, with the same anchor text. It's human nature for the webmasters to use different phrases, so the SE's would see this as unnatural if they were all the same.
One idea could be to use our system to create the volume around the key phrases and then use some other SEO activity to add in 10-25% extra links with a much wider spread of anchor's. (This is what we do!) Without getting into too much detail, you're trying to create a 'bell-curve' weighted distribution of your key terms, with a blurred 'edge' - i.e. small numbers of links with a large variety of anchor-texts.
When all is said and done, we submit around 3,000 links per month
- so you can 'gear' your monthly volume however you like!
You can change the slots whenever you need - but our advice is not to change it too often. Simply come back to the Members Area and enter your new URL's and corresponding anchor text values. Remember to use the test facility that we provide each time to ensure link integrity. We will then hand-check the pages to ensure they meet our ethical guidelines and distribute them into the feed cycle. Because of the size and 'inertia' of our system, it can take weeks for your individual changes and updates to make it through the system and permeate out to the real world.
Make sure that all the URLs/web addresses that you send us do actually work (...you'd be amazed...) and include the full "http://www." at the start. The simplest way is to navigate to your web-page and just highlight and copy the web address directly from a browser into our form. If we discover broken links in your submission, then we will send you an email with the issue - but don't rely on us to find your mistakes, we may miss them! Once links are out on the internet, they cannot be retrospectively changed - so make sure you test each one in the Members Area.
Keyword Research & Analysis:
There are a number of useful tools & sites out there for keyword research. The most important and free one is The Google Keyword Tool... Google's own information on search phrases and volumes. Anyone serious should be using this to look for the right anchor text phrases for their market.
It also suggests many other terms along with their average and recent search volumes (opinion is divided on how accurate this is - but it can provide a comparison guide between phrase popularity.) Remember to set the geographical locality before you do the search, so you are looking at the right country's results!
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal < Click to Visit
The de-facto industry standard tool for in-depth keyword research and analysis is 'Market Samurai'. This software is not free - but is considered to be one of the best by just about everyone in SEO! Depending on offers/discounts it's typically in the $100-$150 range to purchase. As mentioned above, the Niche Pursuits blog is also a great source of information for those new to on-line marketing, and their tool 'Long Tail Pro' (again, not free) is very useful.
The Challenge 2010 < Click to Visit
The Challenge is quite simply one of the best starter online marketing courses. We feel that some of the explanations and videos from the 2010 event are better than the newer 2011 counterparts. It's worth watching the 2010 versions first - especially on module 1 (the Market Samurai & keyword/niche selection videos.) Thsi is THE SITE to start with if you want to really get to grips with starting your own online business.
The Challenge 2011 < Click to Visit The 2011 'Challenge' full video training program
Good luck!
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