Search engine optimization is not rocket science. Let’s just accept that as fact. A lot of people that make a lot of money in the SEO industry would have you believe that it is. But the underlying truth is that search engine optimization is driven by content and in order to achieve high rankings you need to have unique content on your site. Now, there are large number of other factors that Google in particular takes into account when ranking sites, but at the top of that list is content. At the end of the day if you don’t have any content on your subject matter(s) you will stand very little chance at appearing anywhere in the top 10 listings on Google for anything. 
To prove a point, I’ve created this here blog post as a shameless plug for my own business on a topic of which I need some search ranking help with. So, it’s a case study in action, and while it could fail to fully do what I want it to do…the fact is, it’s almost guaranteed to help. But let it to be known, I’m writing and optimizing this post for the search term “Naperville Search Engine Optimization“, and I do it without shame :). At the time of writing this post, I’m listed on Google on page #4 for the keyphrase. That’s just not good enough!
I’m going to break down the anatomy of the post and point out the main elements of it which will help my search engine rankings so you can do the same thing for posts on your site.
Title Tag - Take note the very first words of this page’s title tag is “Naperville Search Engine Optimization“, the very keyword (or keyphrase if you prefer), that I’m targeting. I’ve said this in a previous blog post, and I’ll say it again because it’s extremely important, the first few words of your title tags are the most valuable. So don’t waste them on your site name or something totally non-descriptive. Your most important keywords should live there.
Header Tag - The page has an H1 html tag in it, and it’s the same as the title tag. Search engines look for header tags to determine the topic(s) of your pages. If you don’t have any in your HTML code, you make it difficult for the search-bots to determine the context of the page.
Breadcrumbing - Breadcrumbing is great for SEO as it provides an additional location to drop keywords as well as it provides an additional way for search-bots to understand and traverse the hierarchy of your sites content. In this case, depending on how you found this page, you may see the breadcrumbing as “Home > Google > Naperville Search Engine Optimization: A case study in action” or it may be one of the other “tags” on the blog. Speaking of tags…
Tags - The beauty of using a CMS like WordPress is that it allows to create tags, which is essentially an additional way to point out the keywords of your content and a great way to link similar posts together. You’ll see in this case I’ve used quite a few tags that highlight what the page is about. SEO, Naperville SEO, Naperville Search Engine Optimization, etc. By using these tags, you (as well as the search-bots) can find other content in my blog about these same topics quickly.
Author Tag – If you’re not already set up for Google Authorship, you need to be. You can read about that in previous blog post I wrote titled “Want to stand out in Google? Try Google Authorship“. In this blog post, as well as all my other blog posts, you will see that I’ve linked my name to my Google+ profile using the rel=”author” tag. This connects the post to my Google+ profile and increases the search visibility of myself as an author. By increasing my visibility I increase my authority on the subject matter at hand. At the same time, I increase the visibility of my Google+ profile which allows people to connect with me on a more personal level which is always awesome. And by having Google Authorship set up, my lovely mugshot appears next to my Google listings and allows me to stand out in the search results over those that don’t have Google Authorship set up. At the time of writing this blog, most people have not set up Google Authorship. At some point that is likely to change. So, enjoy the spoils of being an early adopter while you can.
Image Alt Tag - Image Alt tags are still important. They allow search engines, which can’t see the words in an image, to know basically what your images are trying to convey. In this case I used the same words I used in the image itself “constructing a search engine optimized web page“. This includes a variation of my targeted keyphrase. I used a variation of the keyphrase so that the blog post doesn’t appear robotic. Pages should be put together in a natural manner, and so instead of just plugging in the same “Naperville Search Engine Optimization” keyphrase as the alt tag, I used something that was a bit more natural, but that is still essentially targeting the same thing.
File-naming - You will notice that the URL for this page is “www.transcendevelopment.com/web-design-news/naperville-search-engine-optimization-a-case-study-in-action/”. Another hallmark of WordPress is its permalink functions. Instead of having a page url as “?page_id=1000″, I have permalinks set up to re-write the urls with the title of the page. This is yet another location for search engines to look at and get an idea of what flavor my page is. ?page_id=1000 would tell nothing about the page…but “naperville-search-engine-optimization-a-case-study-in-action” gives a quick idea. You will also see, if you look at the page code, that I’ve named the image on this page “search-engine-optimized-web-page.jpg”. This will help me out when this image gets indexed by Google. The naming convention of my image allows Google to know what the image is about, and when people search for “search engine optimization” or some variation, I stand a chance at having my image show up. Optimizing for Google’s image search is an often overlooked, but easy, way to gain rank for some keywords that may be too competitive to rank organically in the web search for.
Content - Last, but most definitely, not least…content. I often suggest blogging to my clients and the typical response is “I don’t know what to write about“. The answer is, whatever you want to rank for in the search engines. If you want to rank for “Naperville Search Engine Optimization”, blog about it like I have so shamelessly done here. If you want to rank for “bag ‘o glass”, blog about that! Whatever it be and to whatever extent you write, unique content is what search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing and the others like them are looking for. So, if you want to stand a chance at appearing in the rankings for anything in particular, the absolute definitive answer to the question of “how do I appear on page 1 of Google for _______” is WRITE ABOUT IT!
The full spectrum of SEO is enormous, but these points are the essentials. If you follow these points, you will be doing more than what most of your competition is and as a result you’ll probably hold up well in the search rankings. If you’re in a more competitive industry it may take going beyond the basics to achieve rank, in which case you’re really better off consulting with a professional. And if you happen to be looking for that professional…let’s talk ;)
