SEO is Relevance

• Relevance is a term used to describe how pertinent, connected, or applicable something is to a given matter. A thing is relevant if it serves as a means to a given purpose. Imagine a patient suffering a well-defined disease such as scurvy caused by lack of vitamin C.
• The relevant medical treatment for him would be doses of tablets containing vitamin C (ascorbic acid). Other medicines, such as vitamin B, are non-relevant. Given this example, we can generalize and have the following
• Definition: Something (A) is relevant to a task (T) if it increases the likelihood of accomplishing the goal (G), which is implied by T. (Hjørland & Sejer Christensen, 2002).
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance
• Google defines relevance in very specific ways. Your website is relevant to a search phrase if it, in Google’s opinion, increases the likelihood of a person’s search finding his or her goal successfully.
  • The top organic return in the lower left corner of a Google search return page are determined by Google’s secret algorithm to be the most relevant to the current search phrase.
  • The top paid placement (PPC) returns on a Google search return page are determined by a combination of relevance and an auction process.
• The most relevant sites appear on the first page of Google and get the most clicks. There is little benefit to being on the second page or lower.

• Google’s definition of SEO and using it to your advantage is the basis of search engine optimization.
• Unfortunately, Google never reveals their precise definition of relevance so it can only be inferred.
• SEO offers important business benefits.
  • Lower PPC fees
  • Better organic search engine return position which, in turn, leads to more qualified traffic to your website.
  • Improved website visitor satisfaction with your site as the perfect result for their search.
  • If you have a successful enough site to run ads profitably, SEO will maximize the revenue from those ads.

• Our Keyword research
  • Preliminary
    • Often the case that what you do and how you verbalize your business is not how people look for it using Internet search.
    • There are predictive tools that help refine the initial guess into a broad matrix of search phrases that might be useful.
    • Some tools are based on Yahoo! Data but since Google is so important I think that it’s predictive tool is more valuable.
  • Real life
    • While the Google tool is more valuable it is not always completely accurate.
    • When real data are available a pattern will become clear regarding exactly how people are trying to find your business’ reason for existing.
      • This is a very important “What” because it gives us a clear direction for optimization.
      • The “Why” is best left to sociologists or psychologists and has nothing to do with SEM.
      • The search engine marketing campaign must become totally consistent with this information.
• Our Pay Per Click (PPC) deployment
  • 2 Important Purposes
    • Get clicks
      • Your ad can be on the first page of Google in 15 minutes from the moment you enter your credit card numbers.
      • If you are on the first page of Google you will get clicks.
      • The clicks will tell us exactly what we want and don’t want people visiting the site for.
        • We want people really searching for what it is we do not mistakenly thinking we offer something different.
        • We don’t want people looking for free or cheap stuff unless that is what we are offering.
    • See how people are searching by getting real numbers for the search phrases they are using (impressions)
      • This is the core of optimization because it tells us how people are most frequently searching for what your business does.
      • We will see the most popular relevant keyword phrases and even see the very important word order in multi-word keyword phrases.
• Our Optimization Process
  • Strategy
    • Using the real most successful keyword phrase information from our keyword research we will plan to make the landing page fully optimized.
    • We may need to plan for more than one landing page.
  • Implementation
    • An ordered list of important SEO items
      • The URL itself contains the keyword phrase.
      • The Page Title contains the keyword phrase.
      • Inbound links from site of Page Rank 3 and higher to the website that contain the keyword phrase.
      • There must be some relevant text on the page that contains and begins with the keyword phrase.
      • All meta tags contain the keyword phrase.
      • All possible other tags on the page contain the keyword phrase
      • Outbound links to pages of Page Rank 3 and higher.
    • Depending on the business being marketed, select approaches to high-ranking social media and blogs may begin.
  • Review
    • Careful interpretation of all analytic data must continue.
    • Any changes in keyword phrase popularity must be accommodated in the optimization.
    • Changes in search engine return position (SERP) must be monitored to ensure upward movement.