Pear Analytics

The truth about SEO is that it is not a magic bullet, and you have to work at it for some time before seeing any sizeable results. We believe that search engine optimization is not only a very methodical process, but also a process that requires continuous improvement.

We built SiteJuice™ from the ground up to help us manage the majority of the tedious workflow for our clients, so we could spend more time on strategy, and less on data gathering, analysis and reporting.

The SEO Process You Need To Follow

This is the basic process we’ve been using for years, and it seems to work fairly well. Just remember that search engines like to follow people, and they like to show fresh new stuff. That means, if you have a stagnant site with not much traffic, don’t expect to easily find yourself in the search results.

Step 1: Keyword Research

You will want to spend some time doing research on what words or phrases will actually drive traffic to your website. Choose words that get a descent amount of search volume each month. We see over and over websites that target words that get less than 50 searches per month. While there is the strategy of the “long tail” search, I’m talking more about your primary keywords. We like to use tools such as Keyword Spy and the Google Search-Based Keyword Tool. Keyword Spy will even go so far as to tell you how many companies are buying that word for their PPC campaign.

Step 2: Site Cleanup

Now that you know what keywords you’re going to target, you can go and systematically clean up your pages to target these words. We will only target one or two words per page, otherwise it gets to be too much and then Google doesn’t even know what your page is about. Also, don’t go crazy on repeating your keyword on the page 50 times. It’s not about density as much as it is about where you have the keyword. Make sure your keyword is in the URL (if possible), H1 tag, meta tags, or even in bold or italics in the content on the page.

There is also a bit of technical work in this step as well. We will check for duplicate content, errors, crawling issues, XML sitemaps and more. You would be surprised how much of your search engine ranking performance has to do with your site structure. We have seen sites move 30-40 positions higher in the searches just by doing this cleanup work.

Step 3. Link Cleanup & Building

You will hear a lot of SEO folks talk about link building, but rarely do they talk about link cleanup. What we’re referring to here is going through all of your inbound links and determining which of them could be of great value to you, and then making sure that the anchor text that points to you has the keywords you are trying to target.

If you have thousands of links, it certainly sounds like a daunting task – and it is. Another reason we built SiteJuice™. We take as many of your inbound links that we can get our hands on, and analyze them so we can spit out the good ones that you should be able to change the anchor text on, and see an improvement in your rankings.

Building your links is not an easy task either. Don’t be lured into buying links for a few hundred dollars. These are link farms and Google can easily spot them, and could penalize you, or at least ignore those links to where they provide zero value to you.

Step 4. Content Development

Don’t spend thousands on your website and then put it on the shelf. That’s right. I said it. You can’t expect this stuff to just happen overnight. You will need to develop interesting content that people actually want to read and link to. This is your challenge, Mr. Site Owner. Your SEO professional could help you build that content in a way where it is search engine friendly, and targets the words you are trying to rank for.

Step 4. Rinse & Repeat

As part of the continuous improvement model, all of these steps are being constantly reviewed and improved. We’ll change keyword targets, title tags, meta descriptions and all kinds of things from month to month, just to see what works better.

How Much Time Does SEO Take?

As a general rule of thumb, we think an hour a day is sufficient for most websites, although this will vary depending on the size and complexity of the site, along with the competitiveness of the keywords you wish to target.

It will normally take a website three to six months before seeing them regularly in search results for targeted words. Results will vary, but it’s generally a myth to think that it will take one year before your site is found in the search engines (the Google “sandbox”).

What Are the Most Important Elements of SEO?

Remember that search engines follow people. A site with no links pointing to it, little or no traffic and a few paragraphs of content (what we call a “brochure site”) will rarely be found for any target keyword. Here are the three main elements we focus on when optimizing a site to be more visible in the search results page:

Relevancy – this refers to the content on your site. Many times the mistake is made where the title and description of the page do not refer to the content on the page. Or, the site severely lacks any content at all. There is some evidence to support that updating your site frequently will also help your rankings, so while there are sites that rank high that have not been changed in years, generally this will not be the case.

Popularity – this refers to how many people link to you. There is a correlation to the quantity and the quality of links. In other words, having 1,000 low quality links might give you the same benefit as perhaps 10 or 20 high value links. Links can be attained several different ways. Let’s start with our least favorite – reciprocal links – sites who offer you a link if you will give them one, or purchasing links, are seen by the search engine as much less credible. Many of these links will not pass you link juice anyway, and so the link will add little value. The idea of linking should be as organic as possible in what’s called a contextual link. An example of this is where another blog writes about you and links to your site in the body of their post. Finally, websites might point to you from their blog roll or somewhere in the footer. We’re hearing from the street that the footer links are losing some value, but we’re not sure how much.

Site Structure – this refers to how well the architecture of your site is. You want to have clean, or “pretty” URLs, and if you can do it, target your URL’s to the keywords you want to target. So if you are going after “marketing expert”, you might rename your page from “www.mysite.com/services” to “www.mysite.com/marketing-expert”. You also want to be aware of any errors, crawling issues and duplicate content. We’ve seen some chatter from the folks at Google that duplicate content is less important to them now, but this refers more to having mirror sites that all have the exact same content, versus a common blog post or something.