Section One
What is SEO?
SEO is short for search engine optimization. Search engine optimization gets your page higher up the pages of results when someone searches the topic relating to your site. Hopefully you make the front page, and if you are very lucky …. the first result is the top prize in this business.
Section Two
SEO Scams.
Now that you know what SEO is, here is what to look out for.
If there are companies charging to do something, there will always be those who are trying to scam newcomers. Here are things to look out for.
The whole idea of SEO is to rank high on something that is searched often. If they rank you first on something they made up, your ranked 1 of 1 … and no one will ever know. A good SEO job will get you ranked high on frequently searched keywords. Carefully, very carefully chosen keywords.
I am sure you have thought about these and it is a good thing you decided against it. Putting your site on a few of these is like blacklisting yourself. These are mostly just spam sites, and if you want your site to be thrown in that mix than you might as well just go ahead and do it yourself. Do not pay someone to ruin your credibility.
You may get the offer to post your own articles on their website so they can link to you as the expert. This looks like it would work, and in theory it will, except that if you ever get the traffic not only will you need these articles, but there is no guarantee that these stay linked to you. Since you wrote them, you might want to keep the credit for them.
I know the last one is still up for debt with many people. They are okay with the fact that they may be thrown away at some point, but just want the traffic while the going is good. I believe that if you are doing things right, and they are too, then everything should remain on your site and the links to you will end up in community forums or some other area of public interest.
Section Three
Advice
RSS for SEO
An rss feed is a great addition to any website, but having an rss feed also helps with your sites SEO.
As a starting point, viewing your own RSS gives you a general idea of the keywords that are being used to find you and cache your pages.
An rss feed also creates backlinks with keywords that you get to decide for yourself! If only you could always have control over what is said about your site.
example.
Google sees that your RSS feed says "Football Standings" as the title and it has a link. Google then asserts that it is pretty safe to say your site has something to do with football standings. (as it should)
Creating an rss feed gives Google this information, but the titles are controlled by you. This means that you can carefully choose your word to make sure you control what Google thinks you are.
The more places you can get your rss feed linked to, or the more pages you can post it on the better. All of these sites are now linking to you with the links and keywords you have provided.
Traffic to Competition Ratio
For those that do not like throwing math into things, this article is done and I hope it helped you. If you are interested to know how math will help your site rank higher please keep reading.
I know it might sound odd, but sometimes picking your keywords can come down to cold hard math.
Lets take 'green car' and 'red car' as our two examples. Maybe you are deciding what car you want to feature for your used car site. Lets to the math.
Green car:
60,500 searches a month in google.
1,620,000 sites to compete with.
Red car:
110,000 searches a month in google.
1,520,000 sites to compete with.
If you go by YEARLY searches, that's 1,320,000 for red and 726,000 for green.
Without having to do the math to follow along … the short version is:
Green
hits per year / Google results = 0.45
Red
hits per year / Google results = 0.87
So, there is more demand for red cars (almost double) and less competition (100k sites less)
This is an obvious decision which you probably would not bother even do the math for, but if your two keywords have very similar demand, you may have to compare the Google results to decide what to go with.
Remember, not only do you want to be ranked first, you want to be ranked first with keywords that people actually care about.
I will do a set of mine as a template for you. If you can not follow along do not be discouraged.
3600 site hits a month as per Google Keywords
3600 x 12 gives you the yearly search average
43200 is the yearly search average.
33300 sites in the Google search result.
43200/33300 = 1.3
recap: (3600 x 12) / 33300 = 1.3
The higher that number, the more your traffic / competition ratio.
I hope this helps you setup your site for better search engine results. If you have any more questions please feel free to contact me on my site or through email which can both be found in my author information.
