Best SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) changes with the times based on the whims of Google. What counted a whole lot toward SEO years ago means next to nothing today. But SEO is still an important part of the formula that will, eventually, take your website to the top of the search engine rankings. So let’s take a detailed look at what’s involved in getting you as much Google juice as possible.
On-Page Search Engine Optimization
Follow these 6 steps to stay on google’s good-side as far as on-page SEO is concerned:
- Title: Your website’s title tag should be keyword optimized with no more than 15 words.
- Headlines: Use H1, H2, and H3 tags in your content to mark headlines and include keywords, at least in the H1 and H2 tags.
- First 50 Words of Text: Your keyword should appear in the first 50 words of text on the page, only once.
- Keyword Density: The density for your keyword choice should be between 1 to 4%. Use an analyzer to make sure you stay within those boundaries. Too few keywords and you won’t register. Too many keywords and you’ll be tagged for spamming.
- Navigation: You navigation structure should be rich in keywords. If you have multiple articles on yoru site, use keywords as links for them and put those links on every page of your site to increase the number of internal links. Avoid any dead-ends and make sure every page is no more than 2-3 clicks away from another. Nested, confusing navigation structures weaken the user experience, which Google doesn’t like.
- Avoid Anything Black Hat: Don’t over use (“stuff”) keywords, hide them at the bottom or change their color to the background color of the page to hide them. Don’t stuff keywords in the HTML tags or try to hide them as small text. All these old tricks are no longer effective and will hurt your search rankings.
The elements of a webpage are standardized today. The simplest way to ensure you’ve got everything you need is to run your site through Ahrefs and compare it to other sites that get good scores. Don’t copy them, just make sure your site has all of the basics so you can start to focus on the next phase of SEO – backlinks.
Backlinking
Quality, trusted Backlinks are extremely important to website SEO especially in highly competitive niches. If someone likes your site content, they will link to it and Google likes this. The problem is that getting backlinks from other sites can be tough. Here are some ways to make it easier:
- Article Marketing: This is a favorite tool among super affiliates and consists of you writing content articles and submitting them to directories like EzineArticles or ArticleDashboard. They publish your articles for free. In return, they get more traffic to their site and the ad revenue that comes with it, and you get a free resource box with a backlink to your site. And if other site owners want to republish your article, they can as long as your site link remains in place. Your goal when writing these articles is to provide content that’s useful and friendly to search engines, content that article directories will want to post. Done correctly, this can bring a ton of good backlinks into your site! It’s important to write original content when posting to these sites – don’t repurpose PLR material and, if you do, make sure you run your version through CopyScape to make sure they don’t show up as duplicate content.
- HubPages: This is similar to article marketing in that you place free content on other websites, in this case they are hub-style sites. Because they are loaded with backlinks, interlinking pages, and categories, these sites usually rank very high in Google. You should have a Hub for every site that you create. As noted in the previous paragraph, run your article through CopyScape if you choose to re-purpose a PLR article rather than write you own original content to avoid plagarism.
- Commenting on Blogs and Forums: If done correctly, this can help you add a lot of high quality backlinks to your site. If you post on a forum, include your site link in your signature but be sure to contribute valuable feedback and comments in your post. Don’t just create a post for the sake of promoting your link in the signature. No forum moderator will appreciate that and you could be banned. The same thing goes for commenting on blogs. Make useful contributions and you will be welcome anywhere.
- Trusted Link Building: Two site domains that rank high in Google trust are .edu and .gov. While these sites are generally not easy to get backlinks from, there are tool that will help you find trusted sites that allow commenting and will even post your link in a directory. These sites can bring in traffic, even if they are no-follow sites.
Link building is one activity that every site owner needs to do if they want to maximize their chances of ranking high in the search engines.
