Don’t be scared of the SEO monster.  That is one thing I learned from Ric Dragon’s talk at BlogWorld.  I had the opportunity to interview him at BlogWorld and he gave me some other great nuggets of wisdom.  Ric is the founder of Dragon Search Marketing and I highly recommend you head over there to learn more about SEO.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is basically how search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo find the content on your website.  They want this content to be relevant to the question or keywords that the person is typing into the search.

If you are a carpet installer in Miami,you want your website to come up on page one of the results if someone types “new carpet miami” into the search.  But how do you do it?  Content, keywords, tags, and authority.  Watch the interview for more tips.

 

 

Ric’s BlogWorld Session

Ric is the CEO and co-founder of Dragon Search Marketing and can be found at @RicDragon.

He talked about SEO for the Rest of Us which was a great talk on how to look at SEO very basically so you wouldn’t be afraid of the SEO Monster.

Three fundamental things to do with SEO

  1. Research.   Some SEO tools to help you do research are Google Trends, Google Insights and http://collectiveintellect.com/
  2. Doing things the right way – follow best practices.  Don’t game it, people!
  3. Making connections – links.  Inbound links are how you get more authority.  Having people link to your content, having links to your site from social media sites can help.
More notes:
  • Google has said that they don’t pay any attention to Meta tags (Title, Description, Keywords) but Ric says that they do matter because those are things that come up in searches.
  • Typically he keeps the Title tag the same as the actual title of the page or blog post unless your Meta title could be a little more interesting to someone doing a search.    Sometimes the blog post title is more “sexier” to get more shares but the Meta title is more straightforward.
  • The H1 header is the most important.  Make sure you have good keywords in it.  You can have multiple H2 headers.
  • Lists are not only important to SEO but makes your page more readable.
  • The most important thing with SEO is to just do the right thing that makes sense for your site.    Don’t try and “trick” Google.
  • CSS Zen Garden is a site that will show you lots of different style sheets.
  • Create a Back Link Portfolio of Easy links (but may have low value) all the way up to High value links that may be more difficult to get.
  • Test your links to make sure they open properly so that you don’t have broken links.