These days, a lot of my customers ask me questions about optimizing their website for search engines. There are questions about what that means, why it takes months, and why it costs thousands of dollars. Since I’ve answered this question quite a few times, I thought I would finally write an article as both a reference for my potential clients, and a helpful guide for the rest of the world. So without further adieu, here is the search engine optimization process in layman’s terms – when possible.

The starting point for all your SEO efforts and strategies should be your target market and how they’re using the search engines. We call this a ‘preliminary keyword analysis’ and it involves brainstorming and refining the list of phrases that your potential customers would use to find you on a search engine.

A target keyword is a phrase (or a few phrases) that your most qualified leads are typing into search engines. If you provide a product or service, you’ll probably want to target phrases that are specific, and funneled to your most qualified buyers. To use my business as an example, a phrase that gets a lot of traffic is ‘web design,’ but because the phrase is so broad – it could mean a someone is looking for help with code or styling, or maybe web design techniques or schools or a number of other things that aren’t related to my web design services. On the other hand, a key phrase like “Professional Web Designer Portland” is very much a phrase we would do well to rank high for.

The other half of selecting the perfect keywords is the competition. Usually, the more specific the keyword, the less competition there is, and the smaller investment it will take to reach the #1 spot on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). You’ll want to do a traffic analysis along with this, to make sure it’s worth it to pursue a certain key phrase.

So what do you have to do to get listed #1 for your term? Your site has to be relevant and credible in the eyes of the search engine. The exact scientific formula (called an algorithm) is specific to each search engine and privately-owned by the search engine company – think of it as a trade secret. The algorithm is programmed to display the results that have the best combination of relevancy and credibility for the search phrase. This means, the top spot on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is reserved for the most relevant and credible website on the Internet! Feeling overwhelmed yet?

Let’s examine relevancy a little closer. Relevancy gives your site/page a solid foundation for its keywords, and will help it get promoted faster in the next step. To make your site relevant, you need to use your keywords in the important areas of your website, including your title bar, page description, image tags, h1 and h2 headings, bold phrases, and link text (pointing to other pages on your site). This takes a little time to get it right, but relevancy is definitely the easier (and consequently, the less important) of the two factors.

On the Internet, credibility is everything. In a very short amount of time, just about anyone can build a website (not necessarily an effective one) that is ‘more relevant’ to a certain keyword, so imagine how much garbage the SERP would have if webmasters could control what ranking they received just by adding a few key words. No one would use a search engine that just returned pages of garbage sites. That said, deciding which sites are better than others is a very important task left to the search engines.

The search engines are most concerned about the number of sites linking you, what they say about you, and what their credibility is (which turns into a never-ending computation). You get to the top of the SERP by getting a combination of more links, higher credibility links, and keyword-rich anchor text. Anchor text is the geek-speak for the underlined words that make a link. By having another site link to your website using the phrase “Car Repair,” the search engines see you as having more credibility for the phrase “car repair,” which can be very useful if you’re trying to get to the top spot for that keyword.

In a nutshell, by increasing your site’s credibility and relevance to your target keywords, you will start rising up the ranks of the SERPs, moving toward that coveted #1 spot.