You have a great business model set up for your natural soaps, vegan eye shadows, or whatever fancy schmancy beauty product you have. A simple website built.  Social media set up. Now as you try to Google search ‘How to increase views on my website’, you come across this recurring term—search engine optimization (SEO).

What is SEO exactly?

SEO is the process of increasing traffic to a website through organic or un-paid search.  Most search engines determine a website’s ranking of visibility through a computed algorithm.  I will begin my discussion on this algorithm with a short 3 minute video from Search Engine Land.

For those who have more than 3 minutes, here are my additional insights into these stated five factors.  As the video said, the first factor is that ‘Words matter’. Every trackable word on your website is analyzed by Google to determine what it is all about.  It is high quality content that search engines crave, so make sure that your material is useful content that aims to give the best user experience.   When I say trackable, I mean websites with HTML text that can be read by crawler-based search engines. For example, if your website was completely flash-based, the search engine simply sees everything as pictures and wouldn’t be able to use any of your text for search.

Second, ‘Titles matter’. Let’s give you an influential example. In 2011, Kate Smith wrote on her blog that Lush began using SEO on their new website.  She explained how Lush has recently retitled their most popular product ‘bath bombs’, or <title>Bath Bombs</title> in HTML code, rather than what they had always titled bath ballistics, <title>Bath Ballistics</title>.  Reason? Most people call them ‘bath bombs’ rather than ‘bath ballistics’.  Be cautious of what your company titles things and what your customer actually prefers calling them.

Third, ‘Links matter’. Like the video said, the number of incoming links to your site is recognized by Google as good referrals.  Obviously, the more the better. How do you increase the numbers? The major thing is to look back at factor number one-words matter.  Good content will always attract others’ conversation.  You can also think about adding your site’s URL to your signature when posting on other beauty forums and/or submitting your site to different directories.

Fourth, ‘words in links matter’. The video suggested that if other websites linked your site with the word ‘make-up’, then you will score a better ranking when people search for make-up. However, if you’re a start-up and not a lot of people know about you yet, I would suggest start linking different parts of your website together.  For example, if you were writing an article about ‘how to use hairspray’ and you wanted to direct people to your previous article about recommended hairspray brands, I would suggest publishing, ‘there are a few hair spray recommendations that I have suggested’ as opposed to ‘click here  to see my recommended hair spray brands’. (Underlined words represent links)

Finally, the last point in the video is just a summarization of doing well in all the above factors. Basically, if you provide good quality and recent content with clear titles and links, you’re on your way to SEO savy-ness.

ONE LAST TIP! Tags or keywords do not improve SEO on google search.  It may help with other search engines, but because of over-abuse by many websites owners previously, Google no longer accounts for tags/keywords in the ranking of websites.

And just to clarify, SEO is only for un-paid or organic search improvement.  If you want to pay for better search options, that will be covered in a later post.