SEO: A 3 Step Program

Writing by Brick Marketing in SEO

Sometimes it seems like almost anything can be done in “3 easy steps” these days. Losing weight, building a business, earning extra income, getting over an ex, and the list goes on and on. SEO can also be categorized as a 3 step program, but it certainly isn’t easy. In order to find SEO success, all three steps must be carried out efficiently. No one step is more important than the other.

Step #1- Research
Like any marketing campaign, you need a good research-based foundation. Just “winging it” never works out well. For starters, you need to understand your audience and their behaviors both online and off. An SEO campaign is built to attract search engine spiders, but the search engines are only the messengers of information to the target audience. If you aren’t sending the right message you can’t expect the campaign to result in increased traffic or visitors to your site. In order to get a better understanding of how your target audience searches, you must do keyword research. Targeting the wrong keywords in an SEO campaign will result in missing out on potential clients or customers. You also need to have an accurate understanding of who your competition is in the online space based on geographic and business size factors. Find out what your competitors are doing online. Remember, just because they are doing it doesn’t mean that you should too, but it may provide some good insights.

Step #2- On-Site Optimization
Once keyword research has been done for every page of a website, it’s time to incorporate these keywords naturally into the content on the page and the meta tags. Read each page of content and add keywords where they fit. Don’t just stuff them in there in a way that doesn’t make sense. The title tag is the clickable link that should describe what is on the page in 70 characters or less. The meta tag description also describes what is on the page, but you have a little more real estate to work with since the description can be up to 150 characters. The description is the snippet that is seen underneath the title on a search engine results page so it should persuade a person to click on the link. The H1 tag, or headline, is the first crawlable text on the page. If the page includes images, use image tags, since the search engines can’t “see” the image. Each meta tag that is used on the page should be unique. For example, the title tag and meta description tag shouldn’t be the same.

Step #3- Link Building
A well optimized site isn’t enough to get search engine spider recognition these days. The search engines rank sites well that are trusted and a good indicator of trust is the number of inbound links that the site has. Link building is an ongoing campaign to build brand visibility and improve a link portfolio over time. In order to build links, you need to create content that can be linked to. Types of content to create include articles, blog posts, blog comments, social media posts, videos, press releases, and online profiles. As time goes on your content will get noticed by target audience members. If it’s any good (which it must be!), it will be linked to naturally by others.