This is the fifth article in a five part series title Search Engine Optimization – Back to the Basics. Yesterday we talked about link-popularity. Today we are talking about traffic as a ranking factor.
Getting visitors to your web site is not generally considered part of the SEO process though it is the main objective. Without visitors you don’t have the opportunity to grow your business in the very place most people are looking today.
Although you don’t have any direct control of getting traffic to your website, traffic is nevertheless a factor in how well your site ranks.
Sites can get away without any SEO if they are a popular site and get lots of traffic without the benefit of being optimized.
This can happen if you drive a lot of traffic through offline means, but eventually, if you are providing good content and a great user experience then people will start linking to your site and therefore drive additional traffic.
This system begins to feed on itself and it just continues to grow as you add more compelling content which takes us right back to the first part of this series – your on-page content.
To your success,
Ken Partain
This is the fourth article in a five part series titled Search Engine Optimization – Back to the Basics. Yesterday we talked about your on-page content. Today we are talking about link popularity and how to use your outbound and incoming links most effectively.
Linking from one web page to another is what has made the Internet what it is today. Incoming links to the pages on your website are weighted very heavily in the algorithms of all the major search engines. If there are no links to your site you may rank for a very few terms like your company name, but that’s about it.
Without links to your site, it is as if you are in outer space. There’s nothing really connecting you to the rest of the world wide web.
There are basically two types of links, inbound links to the pages on your site and outbound links from the pages on your site to other sites. You will obviously have more control of your outbound links, but the incoming links are the main thing that will help your pages rank better.
Outbound links
Google’s PageRank puts a very high emphasis on incoming links when it calculates the value of a web page, which determines where it ranks in the search engine results.
Some people will say that outbound links don’t help with your on-page optimization. I disagree. Linking to other sites or other pages is supposed to help the reader have a deeper understanding of the material you are presenting. Each link is there to help the reader in some way. When you are a good steward with your outbound links the search engines tend to reward you for that. Links added just for links sake aren’t necessarily helpful.
The search engines have extremely complicated algorithms that give a score to each link and they can quickly tell if a link is of value or not. That link is also valued based on the anchor text in that link, the words that are highlighted or underlined, that you click on to go to another page.
You have full control of the outbound links on your site. Use them wisely.
Incoming Links
A lot of SEO professionals would not include incoming links in a discussion about on-page optimization. However, there are more than one page on your web site, or there certainly should be, and each of those pages can have links to other content on your own site. The beautiful thing about this is you have full control of the anchor text used in those links and you can use them to help define the other pages on your site.
You see a lot about building your incoming link profile. The more links you get from related websites, the better your site will rank. I read an article recently from Michelle MacPhearson called Link Mixology: The 12 Kinds of Links Your Site Needs. I think it’s a very good explanation of where and how to build your incoming link profile.
If you need help with building incoming links to your site we offer a link-building program that helps get you started on getting quality inbound links to your site.
Tomorrow we are going to wrap up our series with an article on traffic as a ranking factor. If I can help you further with this topic please leave a comment below or send me an email.
To your success,
Ken Partain
This is the third in a series of five articles on Search Engine Optimization – Back to the Basics. Yesterday we talked about the coding of your website. Today we’re going to talk about the on-page content, including the meta tags.
There are essentially four parts to the on-page content of your website.
They are:
Title
The Title tag is a meta tag, which means it is not usually seen as part of the content a typical user would see. However, the Title tag shows up at the top of your browser when a page is loaded. Behind the URL itself, I believe the Title tag is probably the most important element of on-page optimization. This Title tag tells the search engines what this page is all about. The Title tag is also what shows up as a link to your website in search results. In the image below, from a Google search, the text highlighted in green is the Title tag.
Description
The Description tag is also a meta tag. It is basically a short description of the content the reader can expect to find when they click through to your site. In the image above it is the text right below the Title tag. Typically about 160 characters will show up in the search results. So the best way to take advantage of that is to make your description compelling so that searchers will be enticed to click through to your site. In our example above it simply tells who we are.
Keywords
The Keywords tag is also a meta tag. Because this tag got so much abuse in the past, most of the major search engines simply ignore it today, but there are some that still look at it to pick up keywords that may not be replicated exactly in your content.
Content
This is the juicy part and what all of your human readers visit your site for. The content is exactly that; your article, your blog post, your video, your pictures. They all make up the on-page content of your website. Your content can be really long or really short. Ideally you should have about 500 words per page at a minimum. If you are posting to a blog sometimes that’s a little much. The key is to have unique content about a few keywords so that your content can rank well for those keywords. If you try to put too much information on one page it won’t rank well for any of it.
Take this series of articles for example. I broke it out into an introduction and four follow up posts so that each one could focus on one aspect of search engine optimization. Take a lesson from that.
When all four of these elements are in sync you can rank really well for your chosen keywords. If there is a lot of competition it may take a little longer, but it can still be done. You will just need to work on getting more incoming links to those pages.
Tomorrow we are going to talk about Link Popularity.
To your success,
Ken Partain
Not all code is created equal!
This is the second in a series of five articles on Search Engine Optimization – Back to the Basics.
One of the strongest factors of a website that ranks well is the code itself. This is something that most small business owners never even consider. If a site looks good, as far as they are concerned, it’s a good site.
However, the coding plays a big part in how well your website ranks in the search engines. If your site has a lot of unnecessary code to compensate for lack of technical ability on the part of your web designer, that can cause a problem.
I see this alot with small companies who sign up for cheap web sites because they can build it themselves. The companies offering such sites have done so many things to make the sites dummy proof that there is an extremely high amount of unnecessary code. This is true for scripts as well. Scripts are small (sometimes not so small) pieces of code that make a site function a certain way.
Every bit of code and every script that is required to make your site function properly can potentially slow down the amount of time it takes for your site to load. Site load time has always been a factor in rankings, but just recently Google made an announcement that page load times are going to be a bigger factor in rankings and have even provided some tools in Webmaster Tools so that site owners can measure their page load times and take steps to improve it. Keep in mind that if your site is built on one of the do-it-yourself platforms mentioned above that you will have little to no control over these factors.
Our own site is built on the WordPress platform, which, in my opinion, is a very well coded system. It is an open-source platform so there are literally thousands of programmers around the world working on it every day to make it better. Every site we have built on the WordPress platform performs significantly better in search results, even than the sites we had previously optimized on other platforms.
It just takes a few seconds to look at a site and tell if there are issues with bloated code. Give me a call or send me an email and I’ll be glad to take a quick look at your site.
If you would like to know all the other factors affecting your rankings, you may want to consider our Comprehensive Website Marketing Analysis.
Tomorrow we’re going to talk about your on-page content as a ranking factor.
To your success!
Ken Partain
Clienst and prospects alike have been asking me about some of the real-time search functionality being built into Google and Bing. Google announced today that real-time search is available to some and will be rolled out to all of their data centers over the next few days.
Here’s a video from Google with some examples of how this works.
I originally found this breaking news on Mashable. Click through for more details. This latest change is one of the biggest reasons I have been encouraging my clients to get involved with social media even just a little bit. With real-time search results at the top of the search results I expect that the local map listings will be below that and the top 10 organic (or natural) search results will be pushed even further down the page.
This is why you not only need to work on optimizing your web site, but you need to work on a complete online marketing strategy so that your information shows up no matter where people look.
This is not the only change coming so if you need some help preparing yourself, give us a call. I’d be glad to work with you to get your company to the top of the search engines.
To your success!
Ken Partain
