A Review of SEO Fundamentals

While certainly not an exhaustive list of tactics, these are some of the essentials.

By Bill Mickey
Monday, March 2, 2009

Search engine optimization is a perpetual exercise in tinkering and tweaking. There are, however, some bedrock fundamentals that, if not implemented, will severely cripple your ability to achieve a respectable results ranking. Here, David Grossman, director of business development at Mansueto Digital, publisher of FastCompany.com and Inc.com, shares some of his favorite must-do SEO tactics.

1. Make SEO part of every site decision. The most fundamental thing that separates sites that have an SEO strategy from those that don’t is a focus on SEO. Just like how everything you do impacts all the other aspects of your site—from content to advertising—you need to think about how SEO fits into the equation. Just be conscious of it as a first step. When you do anything on your site, you should consider the implications for SEO.

2. Create Your “Search Story.” Do a basic analysis and see what search terms are used to get to your site. Use your Web analytics package to determine what content drives high results and expand the list from there. Figure out the universe of terms that drive people to your site. And think about that in terms of the market you’re in and what people are looking for. You can look at the keywords you’re ranking for and figure out what the ‘search story’ is.

Use the Google keyword tool that’s part of their AdWords package. Google will tell you how many monthly searches a word gets and what the related words are, and that’s how you can get into creating new content and tweaking existing content.

3. Good usability usually translates into good ranking. If good content is buried deep, you won’t rank well. If users can’t find your content, neither can the search engines. Typically, the home page is the highest ranking page, and the further back a piece of content is, the less weight it gets. Google determines how important a pice of content is according to how shallow it is in relation to the home page. If it’s buried deep, Google will think it’s not as important. That’s a very frequent mistake. You want to keep the content shallow.

4. Create a Sitemap. Site maps are a great way of ensuring search engines can quickly spider all of the content.

5. Tag Your Images. Make sure you have publishing tools that allow you to Alt Tag an image. Google can’t “see” images, so you need to have keywords describing them. Search engines rely on the Alt Tag to boost the image. The Alt Tags help to increase the overall optimization of content that the image happens to be on.

6. Keyword Repetition and Linking. Frequency is debatable, but make sure you have keywords in the copy.

Linking to related content is also important, and so is having a site that other sites link to. This is also debatable, but over 50 percent of SEO is what you do on your site in terms of content, tagging and navigation. And 50 percent is how many sites, and the quality of those sites, are linking to your site.