SEO And Search Marketing In A Week

Search Engine Optimization And Search Engine Marketing Made Easy In Seven Simple Steps

Nick Smith

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781473610323
• eBook ISBN:
  9781444185966
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

SEO and Search Marketing In A Week is a simple and straightforward guide to mastering the basics, giving you everything you really need to know in just seven short chapters. From stripping away the mystique from SEO and SEM, to uncovering the meaning of jargon and acronyms such as pay-per-click advertising (PPC), backlinking, social signals and algorithms, you'll discover how to structure your website to deliver what the search engines are looking for and to promote it to the world.This book distils the most practical search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) insights into easy-to-digest bite-sized chunks, giving you a basic knowledge and understanding of the key concepts, together with practical and thought-provoking exercises. Whether you choose to read it in a week or in a single sitting, SEO And Search Marketing In A Week is your fastest route to success: - Sunday: An introduction to search engines and SEO
- Monday: Keyword research
- Tuesday: On-page optimization
- Wednesday: Off-page optimization
- Thursday: Getting other traffic sources to your website
- Friday: Pay-per-click traffic: making it work for you
- Saturday: Monitoring and managing your progress ABOUT THE SERIES
In A Week books are for managers, leaders, and business executives who want to succeed at work. From negotiating and content marketing to finance and social media, the In A Week series covers the business topics that really matter and that will help you make a difference today. Written in straightforward English, each book is structured as a seven-day course so that with just a little work each day, you will quickly master the subject. In a fast-changing world, this series enables readers not just to get up to speed, but to get ahead.

Many people don’t take the time to do any research. They put up a website and expect a constant stream of traffic to magically appear. This never happens, so please don’t expect it. Instead, think about on-page optimization, which covers what you can do on the pages of the website itself.

You already know how to generate an initial keyword list and how to whittle it down to the keywords that will give you a chance of ranking in the top ten. You even know the software options that can automate this work. Today we’ll cover the development part of R&D. This will give you a solid start that many of your competitors won’t have and the ability to rank much faster.

You will learn about:

• all the tweaks you can do to the pages on your site to increase your chances of ranking

• your on-page criteria; this means that, after you get Google’s attention and they look at you, Google knows exactly what you are about.

HTML

Just as with SEO, this four-letter acronym/word may fill you with dread, but the term – just like SEO – doesn’t have to be scary.

HTML means HyperText (single word) Markup Language. This is the language that your page is written in. Unless you are building your website from the ground up yourself, this is probably all you really need to know about it. If, like most people, you are using a CMS (content management system) such as WordPress to build your website, putting your content online is no more complicated than making a Word document.

I strongly recommend this CMS option for building a website. After all, you probably couldn’t strip your car’s engine down and rebuild it – but that doesn’t stop you driving it perfectly well. There are probably many thousands of free or low-cost website templates out there for you to find, on wordpress.org among many others. Don’t worry about becoming ‘cookie cutter’ or bland: all of them are pretty flexible and can be customized cheaply by any decent website designer to the point that they become uniquely you.

As you build your site, you will need to consider various elements of SEO, including:

• your home page’s title tag

• meta tags and link tags.

Your home page’s title tag

The title on a web page is the single most important on-page SEO factor. Google uses this piece of information first, to determine the theme of that page and the title on your website’s home page, and then to determine the overall theme of your website. So it’s pretty important.

If you view the source of a web page, the title tag towards the top of the HTML markup source will look something like this:

<HEAD>

<TITLE>example of the title tag for a web page</TITLE>

</HEAD>

Best practice for the title tag is to use a format like:

[BRAND/COMPANY] – Primary keyword – Secondary keyword

or

Primary keyword – Secondary keyword | [BRAND/COMPANY]

Your home page should contain your primary keyword (the keyword you most want to rank for out of all of your keywords – normally the one with the highest number of searches) and one of your secondary keywords. For interior content web pages, the primary keyword should be the keyword the page’s topic is focused on and a naturally occurring secondary keyword.

If you have an e-commerce store with a lot of products for sale or you’re a service provider offering many different categories of service, then you could also create a ‘landing page’ for each category to help direct people to the appropriate product or service they might be looking for.

For example, if you had an e-commerce store selling dog-grooming supplies, you might have the following categories:

• Dog brushes

• Puppy brushes

• Dog scissors

• Dog shampoos

Each of these terms would be the primary keyword for the category landing page, which might have a title like ‘Dog shampoos | cleenadogg.com’.

You could show your expertise and optimize the customer’s experience even more by having some content about the different types of dog shampoo available and the good and bad points to look out for. Then you might break down your categories even further:

• Organic dog shampoos | cleenadogg.com

• Dog shampoos for long-haired dogs | cleenadogg.com

• Dog shampoos for short-haired dogs | cleenadogg.com

You may have some ideas about how to structure your website from the keyword research you did yesterday. Were there any obvious search queries that might give you ideas for content pages? For example, if there were a lot of searches each month for ‘organic dog shampoo’, it might be worth putting together a category or sub-category page on the subject. The same goes for service providers; structure your website into categories with relevant and unique title tags and content for each page.

Remember to keep your TITLE tags to less than 70 characters, as that’s the maximum Goo...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• About the Author
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Introduction
• Sunday: An introduction to search engines and SEO
• Monday: Keyword research
• Tuesday: On-page optimization
• Wednesday: Off-page optimization
• Thursday: Getting other traffic sources to your website
• Friday: Pay-per-click traffic: making it work for you
• Saturday: Monitoring and managing your progress
• 7 × 7
• Answers
• Copyright