A whole mega-industry has been built up around Search Engine Optimization or SEO so the term gets used, and over used, quite a bit.

The basic definition is that it is a set of techniques that help optimize your content so that it ranks higher in natural organic search results.

It is not however and should not ever be used, to trick or game search engines into ranking your site higher than it deserves to be.

Just remember, the Google giveth and the Google can taketh away!

So play nice with Google or suffer the consequences.

On Page SEO

On Page SEO simply means doing everything possible to help Google and other search engines know what each page of your website is about. This way, they will index the keywords that best describe your pages and establish the relevancy of your content accordingly.

Here’s a quick example. Putting the title of a blog post in an H1 html header indicates to the search engine that this is the title of the article and that the key words contained in it have the most relevance to the page. Put the same title in bold and Google will not understand that it is the actual title of the article.

Another good example is how to properly use pictures on your website. A picture may be better than a thousand words, but Google can’t read and index pictures. Therefore, it’s important to ensure that you include text in the background that describes the picture so that Google can understand what it is a picture of and index the information accordingly.

Remember your site needs to be awesome. This is not the same as looking awesome.

If your site is loaded up with wicked cool looking graphics and lots of stunning video and flash, but you don’t take the time to optimize your content, then to Google it will look like a blank page. And blank pages aren’t relevant.

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Google is by far the most powerful and influential search engine in the world. There are others, but if you make it there, you make it everywhere.

So how does Google work? Quite well actually. Here’s why:

The mythical Google algorithm is extremely complex, shrouded in mystery and constantly changing. At its core though is a simple guiding principle: establish what is relevant and rank the results accordingly. They call it PageRank.

When the Google spider comes and indexes your site, it is seeking relevance. How important, informative, authoritative and influential is your website compared to all others? That’s what Google is trying to figure out. Optimization helps Google figure it out.

Give Google what it wants and it will give you what you want. So make your site easy for Google to navigate and find the information it needs. This will ensure that customers who are searching Google for what you have to offer find YOU.

Twitter Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

When we think of Search Engine Optimization, most of us think about our website and how to get ranked on the 1st page of Google. But how many of us are thinking about optimizing our tweets? Social Media is becoming more important not just in our day to day lifestyles, but in how it influences PageRank for both Google and Bing.

Who are you? SEO really wants to know!

In your Twitter profile, your bio is actually the meta description of your Twitter Page. This makes it an important aspect of SEO on your Twitter profile.

Make sure you’re including relevant keywords here that relate to the general content of your tweets, as well as your website. We sometimes overlook this, and put in funny cute descriptions of what we do and who we are instead of keyword optimization. So check out your profile bio and consider the above when crafting your next update.

Using bit.ly for more than link shortening on Twitter

We have all used bit.ly to shorten our links within our tweets. But did you know that it is also incredibly important in terms of SEO? URL shortening services such as bit.ly use permanent 301 redirects to your content. That means your original URL benefits from the SEO juice, and not just the tiny URL itself. (In other words, when someone clicks on the bit.ly link, your web still gets the SEO credit.)

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