SEO 101 - A Brief Overview of SEO Factors

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be critical in gaining the visitors necessary to grow your website. It has been stated many times that SEO is simple, but it's not easy. Also, proper SEO takes time and results are not immediate, plus it is a constant effort, no such thing as fix it and forget it.

It is estimated Google's algorithms use approximately 200 factors in determining a site's quality score or page rank. In other words, don't be an algorithm chaser, you will never decode Google's secrets, so put your efforts into building a great website that provides value to your target audience.

SEO Puzzle – Other pieces to the puzzle include:

• Build a useful site with great content. Keep it fresh and update as often as possible.
• Link Popularity – Other sites linking to your site. In Google's eyes, this is essentially a vote being cast for your site. It is best to have a link from an authoritative site, such as a popular blog or news website. Also, the anchor text used for linking can be helpful for Google to identify the subject matter of your website.
• Age of Domain – In the past year or so, it appears that Google will start newly registered sites at a disadvantage, so your SEO efforts could take 3 – 6 months before showing significant results.
• Page titles – What goes inside the <TITLE> tags of your HTML is very important. We optimize all title tags to accurately describe the key topics of the page, but also, this data is displayed in Search Engine Results Page (SERPs). It is the blue link in Google results. If the keywords searched are in the title, they appear bold. See screen capture below.
• META Description – Another part of the HTML code, the META description is not visible on your website, but it can be displayed in SERPs. This description should be unique for each page and accurately describe the content on that particular page. This is a tremendous opportunity to catch the reader's eye since the keywords searched also appear bold. See screen capture below.
• Optimize all site content. This does not mean keyword stuffing, but a review of content to keep it fresh and be sure targeted keywords are present.
• Headings, such as <H1> and <H2> in HTML should contain keywords, but like everything with SEO, don't overdo it.
• Internal link structure is important, people and search engines should be able to easily navigate the content of your site. Design for people first.

Search Results Displaying Page Title and META Description: Searching "pet adoption augusta ga" demonstrates Page Titles and META Descriptions being displayed. Note how keywords searched appear in bold.