SEO in 3 easy steps.
Ive had a few conversations over the last week with people about search engine optimization, and for that matter search engine marketing and web marketing in general. One thing that I feel far to often these days gets left to one side is the basics, the fundamentals, the ABC’s of SEO!
A) On site Optimization: This couldn’t be easier, its the basics that everyone (should) know. Your content (ie. the bit of your page that has normal sized text, in the example of this webpage, this very paragraph would be considered “content”) should be 100% on topic as to your chosen subject that you wish the search engines to rank you well for. As an example I now should not start wittering on about goldfish or sunbeds, as thats not ON TOPIC for the subject matter that Im approaching.
Once your content is nicely on topic with a relevant amount of keywords (%, and you can check this using any number of SEO tools so just google it) the next thing you need to look at are your titles, this is everything from your title meta tag, to your H1, H2 and H3 texts. If you dont know what these are, then the best thing to do is check up at an html knowledgebase, because you really do need to know what they are! Anyway, ALL of these titles should be optimized to the content text that you are targeting. Ie. if you are targeting Search Engine Optimisation in Kent (I am) then relevant titles are:
Search Engine Optimisation in Kent
as your h1 text
a look at optimising your content for search engines
is good h2 text
in depth analysis of search engine optimisation within kent websites
is appropriate h3 text
Basically whats happening there is that the h1 through h3 text has descending importance for keyword density, and it allows you in each case to bring on a few more keywords, each of which should be repeated in the content of the site as well by the way, otherwise google may see it as meta spamming.
b) Off site Optimization: off site is a bit tougher to optimize - if you aren’t familiar with Google webmaster tools you will find it even harder as well. The best thing to do is analyze your off site link anchor keywords. You havent got any off site links? Well, it doesnt matter how well you perform the first step of on site optimization, your site will just never rank well for competitive keywords as its 80% off site in importance these days Im afraid.
What you need is a link building strategy to attract links from websites that are of a similar niche, or at least have a page that is of a similar niche to yours. If you remember back a few years ago most sites had an “exchange links with us” link, which has, by and large, now died out - reciprocal links have gone out of favor with google, and therefore with webmasters in general. What you need to do is provide good enough content on your site for other people to voluntarily link to it, thats the best way, failing that there are plenty of other ways to obtain links, you just need to be creative in your thinking!
c) adapting your on and off site optimization to the competition; now this is where you will gain a serious advantage against your competitors, as this is the step that is missed out on 99.98% of the time (note: statistic is most likely rubbish, I just made it up ;)) What you need to do is analyse the top 3 positions of the search term that you are trying to target, and work out certain things: the other sites keyword density, is yours similar to them? if not make it so, the other sites link weight, do you have comparable strength in your backlinks? if not carry out another round of link building until you DO have similar strength, or ideally, better strength in your backlinks. Finally, take a look at the competitions other contributing factors, now these are all topics themselves for future blog posts, but they would include, internal link structure, robots.txt, sitemaps, indexed pages, external links, edu backlinks, w3c compliance, quality of coding and many many more smallish factors that all contribute to your sites overall strength.
Once you have these three things in order, you can rank highly for the most competitive of terms, its worth remembering that every site started somewhere, and you can be #1 for any search term, with enough work and enough time to dedicate to it!
anyway, thats enough from me, go check your sites!
MM
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2 Responses to “SEO in 3 easy steps.”
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This is a wonderful source of information for beginner.
Importance of onsite SEO could be have been elaborated more but that is ok.
Great post, this has got a lot of really useful information in, if you where new to SEO then this would be a really good read and would help you understand it.