Basic SEO Theory & Choosing Your Keywords & Landing Pages

Search Engine Optimisation Can Be Confusing - Here Are The Basics To Get You Started...

SEO is an acronym for 'Search Engine Optimisation'. It's essentially a constantly evolving study of what factors the search engines take into account when they 'rank' you in their natural search listings.

'Natural' search listings are the main lists of results that come up when you search for something. These do not include the paid listings. In the following screen-grab from a Google search - you can see the paid listings in the right column and in the yellow box at the top.

The 'natural' listings are straight from Google's main index and show sites listed in the order of importance and relevance according to their algorithm.

Obviously, we want to be as high up the page(s) as possible. If we're the 7th listing on page 23 - we're hardly going to get prospects beating our door down! No-one knows all the factors that Search Engines (SE's) use to determine your rank. The SE's really don't want anyone to know - so they can't manipulate the system. So, over the years an industry has grown up around this - using testing and measuring of various factors to determine which ones are the most important.

There are two sides to SEO: 'On-Page' factors & 'Off-Page' factors. There are also 'off-web' factors such as demographic and geographic information - but we have no control over this area.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is all about changes you can make directly to a site to make it more search engine friendly. This is the easy part and involves correctly setting up internal-linking, using H1 & H2 header tags, seeding keywords at the correct density and in appropriate places, and to some lesser degree, using meta-tags. If all that is complete double-dutch to you, then don't worry - you're not alone! There are numerous EBooks & Forums which explain the principles of 'on-page' SEO in some depth. The bottom-line though, is that while it is the easiest to control, it has the LEAST affect on your ranking. Many years ago, you used to be able to dupe the SE's with lots of on-page factors - but that's been completely closed down now.

The only time that 'on-page' becomes important is when you have taken care of 'off-page' and have a lot of inbound links to create some interest. At that point, careful tweaking of on-page factors can yield some good results.

Off-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO is what's important. Imagine it as a 'voting' system. If another site places a link to your site then that site has given you a vote of confidence. They're saying, "Look at them - they've got something interesting to say..."

The link to your site has two main parts - the actual URL or web address of the page they are pointing someone to, and the 'anchor text' or 'keyword phrase' that is highlighted for you to click. If the search engines see the line:

"Visit our site for the very best in blue fluffy widgets."

...then they see one 'vote' cast. Although you can't see that the link points to www.fluffywidgets.com (unless you hover over it with your mouse pointer - then it should show at the bottom of your browser window), you can see that the text 'blue fluffy widgets' is important and related to the site - because that is the anchor text. So... We now have one vote for the home page of www.fluffywidgets.com based on the 'blue fluffy widgets' phrase. i.e. one vote towards this site appearing higher up in the natural listings when we type "blue fluffy widgets" in the search box.

This always works like this - the anchor text and page pointed to are irrevocably tied together. You can't create a vote for a page without some highlighted anchor text - and that anchor text is what the SE's use to tell them what that page is about and what it should show up under when searched for. Read that again - because that is VERY important. The anchor text controls which searches you would appear for.

Therefore,  can you see why "Click HERE for more information" is next to useless for creating SEO value?

In this example, we created a vote for the phrase 'Click HERE'. Who in their right mind would type in "click here" in the search box to find a site? No-one of course. That is why the anchor text is SO important. It signifies the keyword phrases that you want to rank for. (And by the way, if you DO google "Click Here"  you will always find the Adobe Reader download site at the top. Is that because Adobe want to rank for 'click here' - of course not - it's just that so many sites have a 'click here to download Adobe Reader' phrase on them, that they're number one for that phrase.)

In other words, the SE's use the anchor text phrase to cast a vote for a page. And doesn't that make sense? Google wants to emulate what a real human being is looking for and would like to find. In a lot of ways it doesn't matter if your page is all about blue fluffy widgets, if all the anchor text phrases that point to you say 'yellow balloons', then 'yellow balloons' is what you'll rank for! That is the vote that is cast. Now it's not as simple as that (of course...) because the SE's also use the page title and wording of the page being pointed at to correlate the results, plus a whole bunch of other factors as well (including how spread-out the sites are that are linking to you) - but the essence of this shows that the single most important factor in SEO is lots of back-links from as many different sites as possible with the correct phrases used as anchor text.

Ideally, if you want to appear in the natural SE listings for 'blue fluffy widgets' then you want a page that is entitled 'blue fluffy widgets', with a headline and sub head-lines that contain 'blue fluffy widgets' and it should also be mentioned a few times in the text on that page. Then you want lots of external site links that point to that specific page with the anchor text 'blue fluffy widgets'!

Enough with the 'blue fluffy widgets' now, but you get the idea...

Picking the keyword phrases that you want to rate for can be an art in itself, but people get too hung up on this. The bottom line is:

What does a typical customer of yours type in the search box in order to find your product or service?

...The answers to this question supply your anchor text keywords!

Some Words Of Caution...

Do not use phrases that yield millions and millions of results. In the screen shot at the top of the page, you will see a search for 'Car Insurance' - which has 70.9 million results. I don't know about you, but I don't want to try and compete with 70 million other pages when I'm just starting out!

But... If I typed in "Southampton Car Insurance" (assuming I was a car insurance provider in Southampton) - then there are around 300,000 results. A big number still it seems - but actually quite a small number when it comes to web searches.

I would have a far better chance of getting ranked for that phrase quickly than I would for just 'car insurance'. In fact, if I wanted to rate for phrases like 'Car Insurance' it would probably take years and a seriously large budget, as I would be competing with the insurance giants - not a wise choice at all!

Therefore, we're looking for phrases that yield less overall results - but quite accurately sum up what we do or the product/service we offer. In the industry, we call these 'long-tail' searches - as they contain multiple keywords. Depending on how competitive your market is, the phrases could be from 2 to 7 words long. Typically they will be 3 or 4 words long. I normally recommend performing SEO on phrases that return no more than 1-2 million results at the start. Then, as we build back-links, we will automatically start to gain some ground on the bigger search phrases, and if we put in enough effort, we can go after those big phrases in 6-12 months.

It is also useful and wise to build back-links to individual sub-pages on your website, not just your home page. If you have a couple of category pages for example, which contain links to individual products, then it is worth driving appropriate search terms to those pages too. Don't just create back-links to your home-page. Google and the other SE's are looking more and more at how individual pages on your site are listed and treated.

So... How Should I Set Up My Quadium Network Links?

If you are subscribing to our standard 10-slot package, then you have a number of options, depending on how many sites you want to build links for:

If You Want To Promote Entire Sites:

The best advice would be that you should build back-links for at least one or two subpages, as well as the home-page. This will benefit you overall as the SE's will still count all the links going to that site, and they will also see a more natural spread to different sub-pages.

The 10 slot package could be used to promote 1 site 'energetically', with 3-4 slots going to the home page (with slightly different anchor texts) and the rest spread throughout the key pages of a site. Or, you could promote up to 5 sites with 1 or 2 links to the home page and others to internal pages. Don't use exactly the same anchor text for all the pages. Try and make the anchor text fit that sub-page as precisely as possible, and make sure it is 'on-message' for that page i.e. it represents what that page is talking about.

Don't forget that you can point multiple slots at a single page for more impact, but you need to vary the anchor text. On a heavily promoted page, it is wise to have at least 2 or 3 different anchor texts. Again, this is to keep it looking as natural as possible. In the real world it would be very unlikely that you'd accumulate thousands of back-links, all from different sites, with the same anchor text. It would be human nature for various webmasters to use different phrases, so the SE's would see this as unnatural if they were all the same.

When all is said and done, we create around 1,000 new back-links per month
over the 10 slots (100 per slot,) so you can 'gear' your volume however you like.

If You Want To Promote Individual Offer Or Promotion Pages:

If you're promoting individual sales or promotion pages then again, the key factor to consider is a natural spread of anchor text values. Run at least 2 different anchor text values (3 if possible) to each page.

Of course, you could just pick 1 or 2 pages and push them aggressively for 3 months and then pick some more and so on...

Either Way:

You can change the 10 slots up to once per month. Our advice is not to change it that often, but we will allow that as a maximum. Simply come back to the Members page and enter your new 10 URL's and corresponding anchor text values and send them to us with your membership ID. We will then hand-check them to ensure integrity and update them within 3 days. We ask you to send us all 10 each time you make a change, so there is no confusion over which ones are changing. We will send back an automated confirmation email immediately which lists the changes so you can check we've received them correctly.

Make sure that all the URLs/web addresses that you send us do actually work and include the full "http://www." at the start. The simplest way to is to navigate to your web-page and just highlight and copy the web address directly from a browser into our form. If we find broken links in your submission, then we will send you an email with the issue.

If you have our 20-slot enhanced package, then all the above applies, except you can push double the amount of pages and terms!

Keyword Research:

There are a number of useful tools & sites out there for keyword research. The most important and free one is The Google Keyword Tool... Google's own information on search phrases and volumes. Anyone serious should be using this to look for the right anchor text phrases for their market. It also suggests many other terms along with their average and recent search volumes.

Remember to set the geographical locality before you do the search, so you are looking at the right country's results!

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal