When I built my first website in 1996 as an undergraduate at MIT, Optimizing Search Engines was simple. You submit your website to DMOZ, get listed in Yahoo’s Directory, and use as many keywords as possible in your content. At this time Amazon was just about books, and main street America had not experienced the trauma that has caused legendary brands like Ebony Magazine, Toys R Us, Sears, Kmart and more falter due to the dawn of the information age.

Fast forward to 2019, and SEO is both art, science, and psychology. It’s art because writing prose that takes advantage of Google’s hummingbird algorithm requires a degree of creativity. It’s science because your website technically has to be solid. All of your links should work. You have to have alt tags for all of your images. You have to understand the coding tweaks necessary to rank your website in multiple languages, communicate successfully with Google and more.

I wrote an Ebook: 40 Steps to Google Page 1. You can click this link and download a more specific step by step checklist to get you on Google page 1.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is defined by Google as: the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.

There are over 200 factors that Google looks at to rank a website, and Here is Search Engine Land’s 2019 Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors

So you know that your products and services are selling. What is the first step to obtaining that free website website traffic and how do I submit to search engines? I have seen so many brands that are very popular on social media, but have not spent the same time boosting their google search results. The first step is to identify keywords that your ideal prospect is using on google search to find your products and services. The next step is to focus on those phrases that have low competition.

High Search Volume + Low Competition = High ROI to Google Page 1.

Typically the longer the phrase the easier it is to get your company or brand website to pop up on page 1 of Google’s Search Results.

Free Tools that you can use to identify high search volume keywords are as follows:

adwords.google.com‘s Keyword Tool
KeywordTool.io (Auto Suggest)

Free Ways to understand if the keyword is worth the investment of your time and money is to use Google Operators. They are free and available via Google home page.

Useful Google Operators

• Allintitle

  – Gives the number of websites that have the keyword you searched in the Meta Title Tag.

  

• AllinURL

  – Gives the number of websites that have the keyword you searched in the actual URL.

  

• Site:

  – Allows you to pinpoint which page that Google thinks is most relevant for your target keyword.

  

The Next step to optimize your search engine marketing is to use the low competition, high traffic keywords that your ideal customers are looking for you in your meta tags and content.

The ideal Meta Title and Meta Description are 70 and 156 characters respectively. Remember the best Meta Title contains your target keyword and your Brand Name. Your best Meta Description contains your target keyword, Brand name, and a call to action. Google’s search results pages are where your ideal customers will encounter your brand in search engines for the first time. As your ideal client searches Google you definitely want to draw them in.