Businesses around the world are becoming increasingly aware of the necessity of SEO to build a strong online presence. While SEO alone won’t deliver any company to all its goals, it has become an increasingly important aspect of any successful marketing strategy. Nowadays if you want to be competitive in your space, you must consider SEO. Regardless of whether you are a blogger or a Fortune 100 company, how you market yourself online matters to success.
There are two important areas of technical SEO work that lay the groundwork for a successful online presence. These are on-page and off-page factors that search engines such as Google and Bing will look at to rank your webpage for a given query. For example, if someone searches for “Seattle pizza”, how does Google know which page to rank first, second, third and so forth in the results. This is where SEO comes in. Simply said, the goal of SEO is to help Google recognize that your website is the most relevant, because obviously your pizza joint is at least a half a billion times better than your competitor’s down the road.
What does a search engine look at to rank your page? Some of the more important on-page (your website and its code) ranking factors are :
-Having relevant keywords in the domain name or URL. First word is best, second is second best etc.
-Descriptive page title tags for each page
-Descriptive meta data for each page, while this is not really helpful from an SEO standpoint this is often the text description that search engines will show with your page link.
-Heading tags <h1>, <h2> etc.
-Use of relevant keywords in page copy, targeting 1-2 specific terms.
-Use of keywords in your ALT text (name) of each image you feature on each page.
-Do you have lots of content and pages? This is generally good because it indicates you as an authority and you have more chances to appear in the search results.
Off-page factors are equally important in a search engines ranking algorithm. The elements of off page factors are:
-Number and quality of inbound links. Quality=relevant and from authority sites.
-Text of the link and where it links to on your site. Do all links link go to your homepage or is there some variety in pages targeted? Linking to various areas of your site is good for ranking as it indicates quality content across your site.
-Buying links is generally a bad idea as Google is known to penalize site who buy links from certain link sellers. Probably not worth it to your long term SEO campaign.
These basic best practices of SEO are the start to effective search rankings. It is also important to remember that at the end of the day you and Google, and Bing all have the same goals: a quality user experience through relevance. Much of SEO comes from empirical evidence but the truth is that outsiders will never know exactly how search engines rank pages as this is a closely guarded secret that continually changes as search engines seek to create a better user experience. The principle behind long term success is user driven design. Clear, easy to navigate, well organized web pages with quality content relevant to the keywords that surround your business/webpage/blog will help you rank ahead of your competition in search and in business.
SEO isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. SEO is constantly changing so that long term success will come to the website owners who continually tests and refine their strategy.
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