Andre Jensen is a ten year veteran in the Online Marketing industry who has spent the last 6 years entrenched in the realm of Search Engine Marketing, Andre Jensen is a wealth of knowledge in this industry. He has experience with globally recognized companies including Outrider, Marketleap, Acxiom Digital, and Global Strategies.
Andre is currently the owner of FreelanceSEM while working as a freelance Search Strategist for some of the top Search Marketing Agencies.
How Search Engines Work:
Goals of SEO: Build your site so it will be discovered by the search engines. Design each page so it can thoroughly crawled and indexed properly. Build in SEO Best Practices so potential customers can find your products and services easily.
How they work:
1)Spiders Crawl the web.
2) They extract information from each page
3) Build Index.
How Searchers Search:
1) Develop Query
2) Search and Scan
3) Click, Scan & Repeat.
Engage with your site or go back to SERP.
SEO is a prerequesite for ranking pages. Ranking pages are visible to searchers which leads traffic to the site and the top ranking pages have the highest click-thru.
Keyword Research:
1) Start gathering initial list of keywords to research.
2) When you search for your own site, what do you search for?
3) What would your potential visitors search for when trying to find you?
Selecting the right keywords is critical for success of SEO. You may have an idea of what keywords you want to be found in the search for, but that is useless if your customers search these keywords.
Gives examples from the Google Keyword Tool
Recommends focusing on one main keyword phrase per page of site (though supportive keyword phrases can be smattered throughout the page).
Content:
Content is one of the most important factors of successful SEM. Page you create should provide valuable information that references specific keyword phrases and concepts that are unique to your website.
Content includes Body Content, Headlines, Alt Text, Link Text, Titles, Meta Description.
Search Engine Algorithms will score each area of your page to determine the relevancy of your content. Example: A perfectly scored title tag will be your targeted keyword phrase.
Title tag is the most important tag for search engine relevancy. Need a unique title tag for each page in your website. 70 characters or less, contains the targeted keyword phrase.
Meta description tag: Doesn’t help with ranking but allows you to control what the message is in the SERPS…should contain your targeted keywords & messaging.
Body Text: Search Engines usually read and index first 500 words on each page that they crawl.
Header Tag: (h1, h2)…using your targeted phrase in head tags help SEO.
Alt Tag…use a description of what the image is so it can be categorized for image search.
Link Text: Important that it contain targeted keyword phrases. Search Engines not only follow links but they analyze the text within them to help determine relevancy. Graphic links don’t often have text associated with them, which isn’t good. Footers are a good way to add link text navigation to sites.
Include each keyword phrase a few times within your copy…if the text sounds awkward, slice the keyword phrase usage. Use exact term.
Blogs are great if done correctly…if optimized well, they can outrank the core website. Things to consider: Hosted on its own domain, subdomain or directory. Which platform to use? Who will participate? Of those participating, who will own / drive it? Do you have enough content to stay fresh & relevant?
Create tags with each of your blog posts…artificially increases the keyword density for each of your posts. Use basic SEO techniques while blogging.
Link Popularity: Use Yahoo Site Explorer
Site Index: Refers to the number of pages a given search engine has in its index for your website domain…use Site Explorer or Site:Yourdomain.com
Keyword Density Analyzier: Use the one at SEOBook
Google Webmaster Tools: Extremely important information for SEO
Don’t ignore social media. Grab your business names before someone else does, even if you don’t use the vehicles.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.