The hardest enemies to fight are the unknown ones. Know your enemy and the war is half won. Search Engine Optimisation is a battle, your web content is the battlefield, your programmers and content writers are your weapons. Be an SEO Warrior and combine your fighting skills to bust the SEO defences and get your site ranking highly in the search engines. The best warriors draw on many resources, and attack from more than one side. It’s the same with SEO. The more weapons the better, your job as SEO Warrior is to bring them altogether as one. That way you win not only the battle, but the war.
SEO – Why Does It Matter?
Business simply doesn’t work the way it used to. The internet has completely changed the global marketplace. And SEO is the little bod (well, heaps and heaps of machines) that gets to decide if your business is visible or not. Master SEO and your business is doing good. You’ll be up there, visible, ready for your audience to engage and buy. It’s more powerful than paid marketing. The majority of internet traffic is driven by Search Engines: Particularly Google.
So don your armour, select your weapon, and let’s get you fighting the SEO battle. SEO Warrior Academy just began.
SEO Warrior Lesson #1: Know Your Spiders & Bots
If you’re not yet acquainted with the terms ‘links’ and ‘indexing’ now’s your time to duck out of lesson one and do a quick bit of homework. Don’t be put off by the Advanced title, but have a quick ponder over Chapter 1 (link: http://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-seo/) of this guide, and come back when you’re done.
The Spiders are the bugs that matter when it comes to SEO, and as SEO Warrior your job is to entice them in to your web. These little guys are looking at the relevance and popularity of your site and content. They’ve got one heck of a big job, so make it easier for them. Links and indexing are your friends here. Use them by making your site with a clear hierarchy with text links.
Knowing how your website is viewed through Robot-eyes is essential. They may be super-advanced on the algorithm front, but these dudes aren’t that clever, yet. Despite you loving the look of Flash, images, photos, video, audio and plug-in content, these bots can’t quite see them properly. So help them. Make sure there’s plenty of HTML text. And remember, robots can’t fill in forms, so if you’ve got all your useful content hidden behind a log-in, it’s wasted from an SEO point of view. Provide text for images, supplement search boxes with navigation and crawlable links, be kind to those spiders and Bots with text rich indexing.
SEO Warrior Lesson #2: Know Your Audience
Drop your web programming shield for a moment and understand this: your audience matters and they are your Number 1 ally when it comes to the SEO battlefield. You need to know about general user characteristics: we’re a lazy bunch, our eyes rarely stray from the top of the search results page; we’re cynical, we tend to skip the paid ads; and we’re impatient, we want results now.
That’s the basics. But beyond that you need to know about your specific audience. What do they search for? What are they looking for? What do they know? What do they need to know? What do they talk about? What do they share?
SEO Warrior Lesson #3: Know Your Competitors
Any site will rank highly for SEO without competition. But this is a competitive world, so study your competitors armour and strike at the weakest point. Get yourself in there where your competitor isn’t. You don’t just want visitors, you want the right visitors.
SEO Warrior Lesson #4: Know Your Keywords
Yeah yeah, we’ve been there and we all know about Keywords already. But do we? There are a whole heap of myths surrounding keywords that will lead you up a blind alley that became obsolete in 1999 (and in SEO terms, that’s practically prehistoric).
Like it or not, keywords are still the sharpest tools for an SEO warrior. Therefore, first off know which ones matter for you (see Lessons 2 & 3 and consider making use of a tool such as Google AdWords Keyword Planner (http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner) and secondly, know how to use them in titles, text and metadata. Contrary to what those myths might have you believing, the simplest and most straightforward way to get this right is to just do it naturally.
SEO Warrior Lesson #5: Get Popular
Increasingly, real popularity is being identified by the Search Engines and is reflected in the rankings. Links are your friend here. You need to get your customers to link to you as well as inspire viral sharing and natural linking. The Bots may not be human battle masters but they are getting wise to non-genuine links, so think quality before quantity. Another way to naturally build links as well as constantly develop and maintain keyword-rich content in a genuine informative way is to have a blog. If you are real, offering newsworthy and informative content you’ll get popular organically, so be an SEO Warrior with integrity.
Don’t underrate your gut feeling (http://tfmainsights.com/5-areas-focus-seo-efforts/) when it comes to SEO. You know your audience, so you know what will genuinely pique their interest and engagement. Don’t ignore your intuition for the sake of attempting to tick SEO boxes. Organic content, grown naturally, is the SEO Warrior-Farming approach you want to take.
SEO Warrior Lesson #6: Win That War
By taking on board these SEO Warrior lessons, and filling your arsenal with the best SEO combatting techniques, you’ll be winning the war in no time. To constantly improve however, your best weapon is knowing yourself and how you’re sitting in the SEO Warrior rankings. Use engagement metrics to help you determine how your traffic is interacting with the search engine results. You want to aim for the long-click (see this useful info from Mox.com link: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/how-usability-experience-and-content-affect-search-engine-rankings) to ensure traffic isn’t just clicking on your ranking, but staying with you once they have.
SEO needn’t be a minefield, but it is a battlefield, and to stand a chance of winning you need to arm yourself with the best SEO arsenal.
