This post is a part of the SEO 101 Course from WebDesy.com which you want to do if you’d like to be well-versioned in SEO and you want to do it in the most time-efficient way possible (screencasts, detailed explanations and understandable examples). If you’re not sure what is SEO and want to learn how it can help you with building your online or brick and mortar business, keep on reading. You’ll learn what SEO stands for, what SEO rankings are and why you need them. Also, you’ll get to know the major two SEO sorts. Plus I’ll touch on SEO fashion tastes when it comes to hats with different colors.
SEO (or Inbound Marketing)
First things first, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which basically means doing whatever possible to make sure that the major search engines like your site and show it to potential clients as often as possible.
There’s been a trend to say inbound marketing instead of SEO. In the first place, that’s done in order to separate decent SEOs (inbound marketers) from indecent ones (those that use black-hat SEO). I’ll touch on black-hat SEO later in the post.
Since there are a whole lot of indecent SEO “gurus” who just charge money without actually helping their clients’ sites, there’s a trend to use the phrase “inbound marketing” instead of SEO. Just keep in mind that it means the same thing.
By the way, if you need to explain your SEO strategy to hard-core marketing guys, you want to check out this video.
Rankings
Rankings are basically the places that your site pages occupy in Google. Your ultimate SEO goal should be to be ranked number one for a keyword that prospects search for. Prospects are just the people who can potentially become your customers.
Rankings are the main metrics in today’s SEO, because it defines whether you have traffic for your site or not. If you have traffic, you can monetize it the way you like. You may want to sell ebooks, offer consulting services, etc.
For example, WebDesy.com is ranked number one for “webdesign bureau”, which means most of the people (over 50%) who Google for “webdesign bureau” come to WebDesy.com.
Why Google is Your Friend
I’m talking about Google for the most part, because it’s the biggest search engine nowadays. Sure thing, there are others as well, but they are either smaller (for instance Bing) or just local ones (for example Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China).
On-page and Off-page SEO
SEO consists of two parts, which are on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO is all about what you need to do on your site to optimize it for search engines.
Off-page SEO is what you need to do off your site to improve your site’s SEO reputation (such as building links, etc).
Dealing with SEO, you’ll be stumbling upon the following phrases every now and then: white-hat SEO, gray-hat SEO, and black-hat SEO. As using the right sort of SEO will help your site to boost its revenue and the wrong one can jeopardize your whole online business, you absolutely need to know the difference.
SEO Hat Fashion
There are Google SEO guidelines which specify what is OK to do in order to improve your site rankings and what is not. The things that are OK to apply are within the white-hat SEO, those that Google forbids are in the realm of black-hat SEO. And gray-hat SEO is everything in between.
If you don’t plan to get rich overnight and then just forget about your website, you need to practice white hat SEO, because it’ll ensure that your Google rankings won’t drop any time soon if ever.
Don’t be tempted to order cheap SEO services, because more often than not it just means that some black-hat SEO method will be leveraged. Even if white hat is used, the quality of the service most likely will be in accordance to the money you paid for them. You get what you pay for.
Some SEO-Related Designs for You
Since we talk SEO in this post, check out the following designs that are optimized for SEO purposes.
Seo Market – Marketing Business Template
Nuke SEO support For Magazine Blog News
Marvel – SEO Optimized Business Responsive theme
Smart Seo Drupal 6 Corporate Template
SEO Biz (Clean) – 7 Page Design
Smart Seo – A Simple Clean Elegant Corporate Theme
Screencast
If you like video more, just push the play button on the video below and it’ll walk you through all the aspects that the blog post tackles. Like I promised in my initial SEO 101 from WebDesy.com post, you’ll be able to learn SEO the way you like.
Slideshow
And here comes the slideshow used in the screencast. Feel free to embed it on your own blog. Just make sure that you give credit where credit is due. 🙂
The Bottom Line
The benefit of SEO is that it’s relatively cheap- as opposed to PPC (Pay per Click) – and once it’s done properly and consistently, it’ll work for a long time requiring little to no effort on your part. For instance, if you create great content on your site, SEO optimize it (on-page SEO) and build a few backlins to it (off-page SEO), it may work for a few years without you doing anything for that. The more such content you create the more traffic you get. The more traffic you get the more money you can make with it. End of chain.
Download the slideshow used in the screencast of the post in the following formats: .PDF, .PPTX or just view the presentation online.
Do you SEO-optimize your site? If so, how exactly do you go about that? Have you ever used black hat SEO for your website?
