4 R's of SEO: Robots, Ranking, Relevance & Results

What makes a Website SEO campaign successful and gives you targeted results. Generally, newcomers often forget the basic concept of SEO. Though, sometimes even experienced professionals either forget or simply misunderstand SEO needs for a starting campaign. Main problem that I see in SEO Community discussion forums or blogs is that most of the SEO problems come from very few common points like how to get every Page Indexed, Google SEO, high rank by just one keyword, Website SEO Tips or obsession over link quantity. I decided to share this post to explore more about basic concepts of SEO Campaign, which will be an educational post for newbie’s. Which are the four big R’s in SEO? , What do they stand for? Are they really important for Website SEO? Well the answer is yes. This is because the performance of any website is vastly dependent on these terms. So let’s refresh these terms one by one.

1) Robots

As lotto commercial says “you can’t win, if you can’t play”. Same stands true for SEO. If you want to get you site index or crawl by any search engine, you must get attention of net surfers to your site. Get Quality inbounds Links, make quality contents, maintain robot.txt properly and work to get citations (through social media, for example). Tips and Tools:

• Test your index with Google's site:command.
• Check crawl ability with tools like Crawl Test and Xenu's Link Sleuth.
• Register for webmaster tools with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.
• Create an effective XML sitemap.
• Understand that indexing isn’t all-or-none.

2) Ranking

All website owners want to be at #1 in search engine results. All SEO efforts are hence mostly centered on this factor. But is ranking really that important? Answer is yes. However SEO is not just high ranking or it is only about ranking. I must say ranking is an element of big picture. Ranking helps to generate traffic and increases exposure in search engines. Tips and Tools:

• Sign out of Google and turn off personalization to check rankings.
• Monitor regularly with rank-tracking tools, such as SEO's Rank Tracker.
• Get long-tail data from Webmaster Tools' Top search queries report.

3) Relevance

Relevance means “relevant traffic” which is based on ranking and keywords. As, I would like to see only those visitors who are genuinely interested in my website. SEO helps to boost my business through business sites. For this it is important that I keep my website content, business keyword and business promotion in relevant areas. Generally, people face two kinds of problems: (1) What they think to be popular isn't always popular. (2) What's popular may not be relevant or drive click-through. Tips and Tools

• Estimate traffic volume with Google's search-based keyword tool.
• Use web analytics to track organic traffic by engine, keywords, etc.
• Set up a limited PPC campaign to test traffic volume and relevance.

4) Results

SEO is a long term process and its result changes from time to time. You have to focus on each step and goals to move ahead in your SEO campaigns. Traffic and rank are only valuable if it gives measurable results, otherwise it will just cost you more efforts in terms of money, time and labor. Tips and Tools

• Set up conversion/goal tracking in your analytics software.
• Track your conversion"funnel" - the steps it takes a visitor to reach your goal.