Online Marketing: A User's Manual

Chapter 7

SEO

INTRODUCTION

As I said in the introduction, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Optimizing your search engine presence is, quite simply, the art of making yourself easy to find through search engines. The goal is to appear high on the first page of results when someone searches for a word or phrase relevant to your business.

Google, Yahoo and Bing are the most used search engines in the UK and USA, with Google roughly comprising about 70% of the market, Yahoo 15%, and Bing 10%. When someone goes to a search engine and types in a word or a set of words (“search terms”), the search engine returns a page of links that are relevant to that search term. For the most part, people only look at the first page of results, and if they don’t find what they want, they do another search. And if the page does return what they want, most people start at the top. The top result gets far more visitors than the one below it.

You want your blog or website to come up as high on the first page of search results for as many relevant terms as possible – but how do you do that? There’s the rub.

In this chapter I will look at how to structure your website or blog to come up as high as possible on the most relevant searches. Because they have more than two-thirds of the search market, I will focus on how to optimize your presence for Google searches.

THE BASICS

Search engines ...