SEO For Austin — Your Key To Free Traffic

OK,here’s a much-needed basic intro­duc­tion to SEO and how to use it to gen­er­ate ongo­ing free traffic…

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and refers to the process of mak­ing your web­site “search engine friendly.” This basi­cally amounts to design­ing your web­site so that search engine “like” it,because if they like it they will index it and then return it in search results to other peo­ple … which means free traf­fic for you. This entire blog is about SEO prac­tices and in par­tic­u­lar Austin SEO practices.

What do Search Engines like?

Plain and sim­ple,search engine (just like peo­ple) like fresh,high-quality con­tent! This con­tent can be text,images,audio,video or some com­bi­na­tion. They also like unique con­tent which means the best kind of con­tent to put on your site is con­tent that you cre­ate.
When you’re reg­u­larly adding unique con­tent to your web­site it will get indexed by the search engine and appear in search results. Static,single-page sites will gen­er­ally not get ranked. So it’s impor­tant to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between a web­site that’s designed to attract traf­fic from the search engine (a con­tent site) and one that’s designed to sell a prod­uct (a sales site),also called “money pages” because they are the ones that actu­ally mon­e­tized in some way to make you money. Ideally,you will cre­ate con­tent to draw traf­fic and then fun­nel it to your money pages.

Power Tip:
The other rea­son you want fresh,high-quality con­tent is so your vis­i­tors stay on your site once they arrive. If Google sends you vis­i­tors from search results and they con­sis­tently click back to Google imme­di­ately,this dam­ages your site’s rank for that key­word. And even­tu­ally Google will stop send­ing you visitors.

Keywords:
These are the terms peo­ple use to search for what you're selling.

OK,so we’ve talked about using con­tent to draw traf­fic from search engines,but how does this work? Mostly it’s based on key­words,which are words and phrases that are the main top­ics of a given web page. For exam­ple,this arti­cle is about SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Generally,search engines can fig­ure out what a page is about through some­thing called “key­word den­sity” and “seman­tic relat­ed­ness.” Keyword den­sity is just the per­cent­age of times a given word or phrase shows up in a doc­u­ment and seman­tic relat­ed­ness is the expec­ta­tion to find cer­tain other words or phrases nearby. These algo­rithms are intended to keep peo­ple from cheat­ing and just putting a bunch of key­words with­out any real content.

You can also help the search engines by includ­ing the appro­pri­ate key­words in the “Title” tag of the doc­u­ment,as well as in some impor­tant posi­tions on the page,like con­tent head­ings “h1' tags and by bold­ing some of them and even ital­i­ciz­ing some instances of the key­words. It’s impor­tant that you main­tain con­sis­tency between the key­words in the title of the page and the body of the page. You'll notice in the title of this post are the words "Austin" and "SEO." While this is not as good as "Austin SEO" or "SEO Austin," it still has those two key­words which I want to get this post found for. Even the fact that I bolded my main key­words helps the search engines solid­ify their deter­mi­na­tion that this arti­cle is in fact about Austin SEO.

The other thing that tells search engines what a page is about is the “anchor text” that’s used to link to it from other pages. For exam­ple,in the very first para­graph above “Austin SEO” is hyper­linked to another page on this blog. When you cre­ate a text-based hyper­link,the words you use are called the anchor text. So if lots of other web­sites are link­ing to you on a spe­cific key­word or phrase this tells the search engines that the page they’re link­ing to is prob­a­bly about those key­words. This is true EVEN if those links come from pages within your own website!

This bring us to…
Page Rank

This is a big one and I think it’s often mis­un­der­stood — prob­a­bly because it’s pretty com­plex and no one really knows how it works exactly. But it’s basi­cally a mea­sure of how “impor­tant” a web­page is as com­pared to other web­pages about the same thing and in gen­eral. And it’s deter­mined by the “in-bound” links to that page,but it’s not just the sheer vol­ume of links that mat­ters. Here are the impor­tant fac­tors in deter­min­ing Page Rank:

• Number of in-bound links (other pages link­ing to the page)
• The Page Rank of the pages doing the link­ing (1 link from a highly ranked page is worth more than 10 links from zero ranked pages)
• Number of out-bound links (this may be a fac­tor — we don’t really know,because Google won’t tell us)
• Anchor Text (this may also be a factor)

One thing we know for sure is that in-bound links from highly ranked pages are good! Which brings us to…

Authority Sites

Once a site gets big enough and impor­tant enough,it becomes what’s known as an “author­ity site.” Some exam­ples of author­ity sites are:del.icio.us,Squidoo and Hub Pages. These sites has tons of users and get indexed by the search engines reg­u­larly because of their traf­fic,con­tent and pop­u­lar­ity. So in-bound anchor text links from these site will improve your site’s per­for­mance in the search engines. And the good news is that you can cre­ate them your­self and for free! How cool is that?

Action Steps:

Forget every­thing I just said!!
Seriously,well almost seri­ously. The only thing you really need to do is focus on cre­at­ing value. This is what I’ve been talk­ing about and will con­tinue to talk about … because it’s the only thing that mat­ters. When you cre­ate value by pro­vid­ing good qual­ity con­tent guess what will happen…

1. People will visit your blog and make com­ments,cre­at­ing a com­mu­nity and increas­ing the value for every­one further
2. People will link to your con­tent and boost your page rank
3. People will book­mark your con­tent and gen­er­ate more traf­fic from social book­mark­ing sites
4. Search engine will spi­der and index your con­tent so you show up in search results

The only tech­ni­cal thing you really need to do make sure your title,key­word tag and body key­words match. Obviously,there are advanced tech­niques I’ll go over later,but I don’t want you to focus on this. I want you to focus on cre­at­ing value for your read­ers and our com­mu­nity through great con­tent! Great con­tent is the begin­ning of all great SEO,anyway?

There are lots of things that you can do to help that process along,but you can't do any of it with­out content.

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