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Libelty is the master of Search Engine Optimization. We are ranked highly for our own terms and can do the same for you. After all its probably how you found us.
There’s no question that search engine optimization (SEO) is for many business owners a very mysterious pursuit indeed. Here is a relatively short guide which will help to answer a number of questions about SEO, and how you can use it to gain the best rankings possible for your business’ website.
What is SEO?
Broadly speaking, SEO is a set of steps which a website owner can use to ensure that their website’s pages will appear in the search results for certain keyword phrases. Nevertheless, it’s not merely about choosing a term that seems to fit your business. There are key elements as to how to choose the best terms which offer the most potential and will reap the most reward.
Here we look at both on-page SEO techniques and off-page techniques. On-page is where you take certain measures to optimize your website’s pages, where off-page is carried out elsewhere on the internet where the goal is to obtain extra traffic to the website.
Why Undertake SEO?
SEO is not only an effective way to attract new customers to your business, but it can be relatively inexpensive too. Prior to the arrival of the internet, attracting customers to a business was much more difficult. The main problem with offline advertising is that it tends to take a blanket approach wherein, it’s very possible that your advertising is reaching a large amount of untargeted custom.
On the other hand, SEO allows you to target individuals or businesses who do have an interest in your products or services. This is because those individuals or businesses will be searching for the keyword phrases that you have optimized for.
On-Page Factors
On-page or on-site SEO factors can be equated to the foundations of your house. Without strong foundations, your house will probably not stand the test of time. It will likely collapse at some point. Fortunately, building a strong on-site foundation is relatively straight-forward.
User-focused
It’s wise not to create a website in an effort to attempt to over-optimize it for search engine robots because if you do, you may lose the site’s trustworthiness. In times gone by, those who created websites often would over-maximize the number of keywords used within their content. This is known as keyword spamming. It’s definitely not sensible to do that any longer because it can lead to your webpages being de-indexed by the search engines. Instead, write your content naturally and for your potential reader.
Choosing Keywords
The choice of keywords you wish to focus on is entirely up to you. In a sense, it may be argued that it’s something of an art to get this right, although there are certain ways to help to ascertain what the best keywords are. Using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool helps to take the guess work out of choosing good keywords to work with. There are of course other proprietary keyword tools you can use instead or in tandem.
Page Title
There’s no question that the title you use for your pages is important in terms of gaining search engine rankings. Search engine robots use page titles (and the other content on your page) to gain a sense of what your content is about. Thus, the keywords you are focusing on should certainly be within the page title.
Other than having your keywords within your title tags, you should also be aware that the title tags are there to attract sales. Whenever some does a web search, there are two pieces of site information that they will see in the results – the title of the page, and the meta-description. Both of these together encourage (or otherwise as the case may be) searchers to click onto your website should it be found in the search engine results.
There are of course a number of other on-page factors that should be optimized, but these are some of the main ones. Let’s now move on to off-page SEO influences.
Off-Page Factors
Why do search engines use off-page factors as much as they do to determine a search engine ranking? Well, that’s somewhat open to debate, but in a nutshell, it makes it easier to determine the actual value of the content on a webpage.
It does make sense however. For example, if a number of ‘trustworthy’ websites link to your content, it’s to be expected that your content is of relevance and high quality.
There’s no doubting it though, for a new website, this does pose a lot of issues. For on-page SEO factors, it’s easy to set them up within hours. Off-page SEO factors on the other hand take a lot longer. Nevertheless, with perseverance, you will be able to achieve some good search engine rankings by addressing a few factors. Namely:
Backlinking and Inbound Traffic
Backlinks are given a lot of weight in the search engine algorithms simply because they generally tend to indicate site credibility.
When your pages get linked to, there are four main factors that search engines look at:
Relevance of link text (anchor text)
Text within the link is very important. It once again shows the search engine spiders what your content is all about. However, over-optimization of the same link text should be entirely avoided. If you over-optimize i.e. you use too much of the same link text in order to rank in the search engines for that particular keyword phrase, you risk being penalized in the search engine rankings. Thus it’s good policy to use text such as ‘click here’ and also you should use your web address liberally within the link text.
Where the link comes from
If the link to your website comes from a related business, the link is regarded as a higher quality link by the search engines.
Age of text link
The general rule is that links that have existed for longer are weighted more heavily than newer links.
Google Page Rank
Although Page Rank (PR) only applies to the Google search engine, because Google is the most popular engine, it’s well worth mentioning. PR is another weighting factor that helps to determine the value of a site’s content. For example, if your webpage has a link that is PR4, it’s a far more valuable link (according to Google search) than if the link were a PR1. There’s more to it than this, but that covers the basics of Page Rank.
Again, here we have only considered some of the fundamentals that relate to off-page or off-site ranking factors. There is in fact a lot more to it than this alone.
For a free consultation about search engine optimization for your website, get in touch with us here at www.libelty-seo.com today!