What is Search Engine Optimization? Getting Started is Easy.

Would you like to attract more visitors to your website and build your email marketing list faster?

If you answered yes, then Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be a big part of your 2014 marketing plans — especially if you have a limited budget.

SEO allows you to target and attract more of your best customers to your website. And it’s something you can do on your own.

Why is SEO so important?

If you don’t optimize your website for search engines, you risk losing potential customers to your competitors because their websites will appear higher in search engine results than yours.

Here is an example:

Let’s say you run a cupcake shop in a small town, and there is only one other nearby cupcake store you compete with for customers.

You have a website and a Facebook Page, and you send a monthly email newsletter using Constant Contact, but you aren’t promoting your website to search engines.

Your local competitor, let’s call her Carla, also has a website, a Facebook page, and an email newsletter. However, Carla has been optimizing her website by writing great articles about cupcakes for several months now. She has new pages about the baking process, the different flavors she offers, the cupcakes she designs, and even photos of her customers enjoying them.

When a person in your area wants cupcakes for a birthday party, they’ll use Google or Bing to search for something like “cupcake bakery.” When they do, there is a much higher likelihood that Carla’s website will show up before yours in the search results. This is because Carla’s website has more “authority” for keywords related to cupcakes. I’ll explain authority in more detail in just a bit.

Because Carla’s website is ranked higher in search engines, a prospective customer will likely choose her business instead of yours. It’s that simple.

In fact, according to research conducted by online advertising network Chitika, websites holding one of the top three spots for their keywords get the vast majority of visitors (62 percent of all searchers).

If Carla’s Cupcakes has one of those top spots, she’s going to get most of the new cupcake customers too.

How do search engines determine where my website is shown?

Getting ranked ahead of Carla’s Cupcakes on Google or Bing isn’t rocket science. It just takes a little effort and the right strategy.

Keep in mind that SEO refers to improving your visibility within the organic (or natural) search results. This means that these are listings that you didn’t have to pay for. Don’t confuse this with the paid search results, which can be purchased by the highest bidder.

You can distinguish between paid and organic search results in a few different ways. Paid ads usually say “ads” above them and are commonly highlighted in a different color. Paid ads are also usually found above or to the right of the organic search results.

Now, let’s examine how search engines find and rank websites and how you can influence the position where your free, organic listing is displayed.

Search engines discover content by visiting websites and following links just like regular Internet visitors. But when search engines visit, they read the text on your pages (this includes your blog if you have one) and run it through an algorithm that tells them what topics each page is about.

Then, these topics are mapped to big lists of similar keywords that visitors might use when they want to find content like yours. For instance, a blog post about “Cupcakes for Mother’s Day” might be mapped to words like “mom” and “cake” in addition to “cupcakes” and “mothers.”

Tip: You can help search engines accurately understand what your pages are about by consistently using words that describe each page’s primary topic in important places like the page title, meta description, and within large text headlines on the page.

When search engines see a search request for one of these words, the matching page on your website will be included in the results they display. But how do you make sure your website isn’t stuck way down on the 27th results page?

The answer is authority.

Search engines order websites with similar content based on each website’s level of authority.

Your website’s authority is mostly determined by the number of other similar websites that reference or link to your pages. This includes both standard websites and social media pages and posts too. If your website has more references than your competitors, you’ll have higher authority and your website will be listed first in the search engine results pages.

In summary, if your website has lots of pages covering all of the topics most important to your prospective customers (keywords), and lots of other website owners discovered your pages and created links to them from their pages (authority), then your website will rank very highly for your most important keywords.

The process of creating and promoting new content on your website — with the goal of ranking highly for new keywords — is called content marketing. Content marketing is the most effective technique for improving and maintaining high search engine rankings.

Earning higher search engine rankings is easy with content marketing

Lucky for you, content marketing is way easier than you might think, especially if you’re already writing new content for your email newsletter each month.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Brainstorm a list of topics that will attract the right customers for your business.

Take a few minutes to brainstorm a list of questions your best new customers ask most often. Think about what they need when they first contact you before making a purchase. Make sure to use their words instead of yours. For example: “how to unlock my car” instead of “locksmith.”

Going back to our cupcake bakery example, you might get asked about “cupcake ingredients” or “favorite cupcake flavors.”

Keep going until you have a list of about 25 different topics. If you can’t come up with this many on your own, consider sending your best customers a survey through Constant Contact. Ask them how they would describe your products or services if they didn’t already know about your business.

Use these topics to begin creating new content on your website. Check them off as you go.

Step 2: Commit to writing a few new articles every week.

A great new article for your website is 300 to 500 words long and has the primary topic included in the page title, article heading, and article body itself. Don’t get too wordy. The goal here is to create valuable pages, not to write a novel. Keep them short and sweet because you want to make sure people will read them.

Publish each new article as a new page on your website. Add them to your blog or as pages within a “new resources“ section if you don’t have a blog.

Write at least one new article each week. Add a recurring reminder to your calendar if you think you might forget.

Step 3: Promote your new content using email marketing and social media.

As we discussed, when talking about how search engines rank websites, creating great content is just the first step.

In order to convince search engines to display your pages at the top of the results, you need to promote them so other website owners will discover and link back to them.

Here comes the really easy part:

When it’s time to create your monthly email newsletter in Constant Contact, write a short introduction, then include the titles and a one-sentence summary for three of your most recent website articles. Include a link below each summary to the full version of the article on your website.

Your newsletter is now ready to go.

Make sure you post your newsletter to your Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn profiles. Don’t forget to use Constant Contact’s built-in social sharing tools to urge your email subscribers to share your articles with their followers too.

Stick with it and you’ll turn your website into a trusted resource that attracts new customers from search engines every day.

Keep creating new content on your website every week. If you promote your new pages in your email newsletters and in social media then search engines will begin rewarding you with a steady flow of high-quality visitors to your website.

Also, consider using a content marketing tool like BoostSuite to automatically discover topics that are most effective with your best customers, and pitch your articles to other marketers who can help you increase your authority faster.

How many new articles do you plan to write for your website each month? Have you tried other methods for increasing your search engine rankings before? Tell me about your experience and your plans in the comments below.

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