We have all seen it before…”Guaranteed to get you on the 1st page of Google”. I love this statement for so many reasons. I will keep it simple and only explain three. Either a) they are lying and just want your money, b) they will use black hat practices, or c) the market you operate within is so small you are able to easily climb search engine rankings. My point being, it is EXTREMELY difficult to guarantee a website will show up on the 1st page. However, hooking up with a great SEO company can go a long way in benefit your businesses exposure online. Also, following the basic principles I will outline below will be extremely beneficial:
Building Inbound Links
If you are unfamiliar with inbound links you should know they are the heart and soul of SEO. Inbound links are basically links that point from another website back to your site. The more relavant/quality these links are the more beneficial it is for your website. Some key strategies to follow to help build the number of inbound links are as follows:
– Write entertaining and interesting content that people will want to link to.
– Submit your site to various directories and social bookmarking.
– Reach out to other bloggers and write guest posts that will link back to your site as credit for being the author.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is important because it is essentially using the content of your website to tell search engines what your website is about. These on-page elements include headlines, sub-headings, body content, image tags, and links.
There are number of ways to perform on-page SEO properly. To start focus your effort on the points listed below:
- Pick a primary keyword for each page and focus on optimizing that page for that word
- Place your primary keywords in your headline and sub-headings
- Insert keywords in the body content of your pages
- Make page URLs clean and use keywords within the url thread
- Always write for humans and then search engines
Title Tag and Meta Tag
Many people, unless you are familiar with website coding, have no idea what a title tag is, where it is located, or how it functions. The same can be said for meta tags. Many professionals describe a title tag as “HTML tag used to define the text in the top line of a Web browser, also used by many search engines as the title of search listings” (courtesy of Marketing Terms). A meta tag can be defined as “A special HTML tag that provides information about a Web page” (more information can be found at Webopedia).
Below are examples of what meta tags look like in HTML documents:
– Title:
– Description:
– Keywords:
XML Sitemaps
Imagine a contractor trying to build a house without an architects plans to tell him where each room goes? Well this is how Google would feel if your web developer didn’t build a sitemap for any search engine to follow. A sitemap provides a road map for the search engines so they know what pages exist on your site, what the hierarchy is, etc. They generally are rather large depending on the complexity of your website. You can view sample sitemaps by clicking here.
301 RedirectsThere is nothing worse then navigating a website by clicking on a link and then next thing you know…boom! The link ends up being broken. Most times you will receive a 404 error. This generally happens when the link associated with that particular page has changed or moved. In order to help benefit your website from an SEO stand point, you need to be certain that this type of error doesn’t occur. The way you do this is to set up a 301 redirect which allows you to change an old URL to a new one.
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