Three simple steps to SEO Mastery – Atlanta SEO Consultant

1. Create a website that is easy for the search engines to find and process
2. Uncover the keywords your prospects and customers use to find your business and weave those keywords into the content of your web pages
3. Get important and relevant sites similar to yours in your industry or related industries to link to the pages of your website to tell the search engines that your site is important

What are your expectations?  You must do many little things just right and the process eventually begins to snowball and your biggest results occur during the three month to one year or more time frame, while it may seem like nothing much is happening in the beginning.

Where do you want to be in one year?  Organic search engine optimization (SEO) does take time to see top results, especially in the major search engines.  Everyone wants to be on the first page in Google results… but that takes a lot of time, effort, careful and precise planning and execution – and often a year or more.  (Of course there are exceptions in such a dynamic landscape.)

Get important and relevant sites similar to yours in your industry or related industries to link to the pages of your website to tell the search engines that your pages are important

Search Engine Optimization may seem complicated or mysterious at first, but by far the bulk of your time, energy and effort will focus on those three objectives.  Understanding and internalizing these fundamental principles will form the foundation of your SEO knowledge and will therefore help keep your efforts focused on what’s most important.  Additionally, by focusing on these fundamental goals, it could help prevent you from diverting your resources on strategies and tactics that may have no effect, or worse, could potentially degrade your web page’s position in the search results.

As an Atlanta SEO Consultant I can’t overemphasize the critical importance of maintaining your focus on these three fundamental concepts:

• Building pages that are easy for the search engines to find and process,
• Determining the right keywords or search phrases
• Convincing the right websites to link to your pages

Often unbeknownst to many site owners, they may be inadvertently or unintentionally designed in such a way as to make it difficult for the search engine spiders to find and access.  Some may even be blocking the search engines altogether!  This can leave site owners puzzled and confused.

FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF SEO

Burn these two statements into your memory banks:

• Keywords tell the search engines what your page is about
• Inbound links tell the search engines that your page is important

As much time and attention as we devote to on-page optimization, it is your inbound link strategy that will do more to raise your search engine results than anything else you do.  However, other sites will not likely want to link to you unless you have great content – so the two strategies work hand-in-hand.

Although the keyword phrases you choose to weave into the content of your web pages are critical to telling others and the search engines what your page is about – however, their overall direct impact on your search engine results is limited.  External links, links from important and relevant pages in your industry and your topic and the visible or anchor text of those links will actually have a far greater effect on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) than even the keywords on the actual page.

Keywords tell the search engines WHAT your page is about  Inbound links tell the search engines that your page is IMPORTANT

In fact, as an Atlanta SEO Consultant I’ve seen pages that are established (have been on the web for years), have outstanding, important and relevant sites linking to them and therefore they rank at the top of search engine results – even though the search phrase does not even exist on that page!

However, uncovering the best keywords does play a critical role in telling the search engines what your page is about and you should strategically weave your most important keywords throughout your page’s visible content.

What to do next?  Learn more about How Much Does SEO Cost?

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