SEO 101 YOUR GUIDE TO GETTING STARTED

2

What is Search?The simple definition is that Search is what happens when people look for your specific website or search for services/products your company provides. For instance, a potential customer would visit a search engine such as Google, and type into the search box “manufacturing and machine shop companies” for that specific industry or they might search a particular brand name if they already know which company in that industry that want to use.

Google decides which results to show based on hundreds of factors and their algorithm changes all the time. SEO help provides signals to search engines to let them know that you deserve to rank highly for the keywords you are targeting. If you are a newer company, people are probably not searching for you by name—yet! So for newer companies, SEO is a vital part of your strategy that enables people to better find you based on what you provide since name recognition is not yet there.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SEO is often confused with SEM (Search Engine Marketing) which is when people pay for their website to show in results through ads, most commonly AdWords. With SEO, you do not pay for your website to show up in the results, but there is a cost in terms of time spent optimizing.

3

If any agency promises to get you on the first page of Google in a short period of time, they are probably using blackhat methods (see next). So although ranking may initially happen quickly, Google will catch up with you and the long-term results will not be good.

And it’s important to note that paid ads will not improve your organic results. Some of the more cynical website owners believe AdWords will help their organic ranking since it’s all owned by Google. We assure you that is not true. While we believe businesses should have an SEM and SEO strategy, the purpose of this guide is to assist with SEO. Following best practices in optimizing for Google, which has the largest market share for search, will benefit you on the other search engines as well.

According to Net Market Share (as of December 2016) the share percentage, in terms of the use of Search Engines, Google easily dominates the market with 79% of searches made.

Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second, over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.

4

What is Black Hat versus White Hat?Let’s expand on what Black Hat and White Hat means so you know what to watch out for when selecting an SEO partner.

A common black hat technique is purchasing links or submitting web addresses to link farms. This is a desperate tactic to get any link pointing to a site and Google is very clear that link schemes, such as this, will hurt website owners. But good quality links, from reputable sites can help a website’s ranking.

Keyword stuffing is another shady technique. When people add a number of keywords that do not fit well with the content, they are trying to push their ranking up for that word. Here’s an example of a poorly written description about Hawaiian vacations: “Are you ready for a Hawaii vacation? Discover the best Hawaii vacation available. Come to Hawaii. Vacation with us in Hawaii now.” Admittedly, that happens to be terrible copy, but the point is made. Throwing the words “Hawaii” and “vacation” into a page too many times will not help your site’s ranking.

The goal of Black Hat practitioners is to trick search engines rather than provide value to people. It brings fast results with later problems, as mentioned earlier, perhaps even getting your site banned from search engines.

Although White Hat techniques take longer to bring results, they focus more on the people benefiting from the content rather than the search engines. It results in solid leads and new customers.

5

On-Page SEOThis is the place to start with any SEO strategy. With on-page SEO, you optimize your website to be found — legitimately — by search engines as well as people by using the right keywords appropriately. Technical SEO is about including meta tags that provide search engines information about the site. Note that Google no longer uses the keywords meta tag. You, of course, still need relevant keywords in your copy, but putting those words in the meta tag no longer helps your ranking.

Use images and videos As long as you use alt tags to describe your images, they have an impact on SEO. Since Google cannot “see” an image, it looks to alt text which describes that image. Google needs that text to decide whether or not it should show an image to a searcher based on keywords used.

Videos too are important. If you want them to show up in search, you need to provide a title, description and thumbnail for Google to index them.

There are a lot of different strategies for making sure your videos get included in Google’s index. Maybe companies opt to host their videos on YouTube because it’s easy to use and has a direct connection to Google. However, YouTube’s goal isn’t to send traffic and leads to your site. They want to keep viewer on YouTube, so with this in mind, you may also want to consider a video hosting platform like Wistia.

6

If videos are not yet part of your marketing strategy, we encourage you to incorporate them since it can be a great way to communicate with your audience.

Off-Page SEOThis is the most challenging of all processes and requires continuous work if you want to ensure continued growth for your business. Tasks here include creating good social media content, reaching out to influencers or submitting guest posts with a link back to your site. Over time, this increases your online authority and visibility to Google, which also means your site will appear more often in the search results for pertinent keywords.

Content is still kingA significant part of your ongoing SEO is developing and sharing quality content. The focus here is quality. Repetitive or low quality content will not help with your ranking. Remember the Hawaiian vacation example above? Although content may be optimized for SEO, it won’t rank well on search engines if the quality is poor.

o Write Original and High Quality Content: Create content that people cannot easily find elsewhere. If they like what you have to say, they are more inclined to come back and become part of your viral strategy as they share it with their connections or post a link back to your site.

7

o Create Evergreen Content: Evergreen content does not have an end date. In other words, you are creating content that will still be applicable long term. This results in less work for your content team as the content can be pushed out across multiple channels and easily re-used at different times.

o Stay current on keywords: Consumer behavior and trends change over time which means the way people search also changes. You can use Google Trends to see what’s being discussed by region. AdWords keyword tool is helpful to see search volume for paid keywords, but you can also integrate those words into your organic content. Soolve is another good resource for generating keywords.

o Building Links: We provided warning earlier about buying links or submitting your website to link farms. Good content will bring in links. You need to ensure broad distribution happens through social media and by reaching out to influencers to broaden your audience. When you have quality links, search engines perceive them as indicators of how authoritative and how popular your website is -- and with the right links, your site will earn a higher position in the organic search results which brings you more traffic.

o Effective Headlines: A headline can make or break you. You have a brief moment to garner interest in your content and this is done through the headline. Headlines must be captivating enough to make visitors want to read your content while also being optimized for search engines. If your headline is too long, Google truncates it in search results which defeats the goal of being prominent and inviting. Headlines also have to be short enough to allow people to share your content on channels such as on Twitter without having to edit it. Also, in the case of newsletters, titles should be visible in the

8

subject line which is why they need to be short. If you’re stumped on creating the perfect headline, check out Portent, a free tool to help you generate a catchy headline.

Content marketing and SEO go together, with priority being given to creating good quality content and then optimizing it for search engines. This approach results in a win-win situation where your target audience discovers relevant, interesting content and search engines pick it up because it is optimized with keywords in a way that is natural.

An SEO Case StudyStill not convinced an SEO strategy is worth the time and effort? We understand. It can be frustrating to put so much work into your site but not see it pay off. Check out our case study for two of our clients and how they benefited from investing in SEO.

Conclusion

10

Let’s wrap up what we covered about SEO and take you through the next steps for your SEO strategy.

1. If you already work with an agency, find out how they get your current rankings. You want to know if they are using white hat or black hat methods.

2. Complete a technical audit of your site and create a list of meta tags and descriptions that need work.

3. Ensure all images have an alt tag.

4. Review any videos that are already uploaded. Do they have complete descriptions, meaningful titles, and relevant keywords?

5. Identify top content pages in your Google Analytics. What are the topics that are of interest to the most people?

6. Seek out guest post opportunities. Although you want to build up the ranking for your own site rather than someone else’s, this can be a helpful way to get your name out there.

7. Audit your backlinks. Are they quality links or links from spammy sites?

8. Read previous content on your website. Can it be reworked with a new heading and redistributed to your audience?