South Florida Web Design, Brand Management, SEO and Digital Marketing Agency

If you’ve studied SEO for any length of time, you know that there are things you must do to your webpages themselves, called “on page optimization,” and things external to your website, called “off page optimization.”

While there are a number of tactics that fall into the off page optimization category, the most important is the building of quality backlinks. A backlink occurs whenever an image, a piece of text, or your full website url is linked “back” to your site from some other.

The best links are those that are “one-way,” meaning that a site links to you but you do not link back to them. It can be beneficial to “trade links” (called reciprocal linking) with another webmaster for the purpose of gaining website traffic but it’s not a strategy that will improve your search engine rankings or SEO.

As each page of your website should be optimized for 1-3 keyword phrases, it’s best to build “anchor text links” (aka text links, hypertext links, hyper links, contextual links) that include the keyword phrases you are targeting. The more links you build, the better your ranking will be for the terms contained in the links.

The Importance Of Building Quality Backlinks – Here’s a perfect example of this in real life:

If you search Google.com for the term, “click here,” you will find a page that gives access to the free Adobe Reader (a page off of Adobe.com) ranked in the first position.

This is an interesting/valuable observation as their page is not optimized for this keyword phrase at all. You won’t find it in their Page Title, their Meta Page Description, or anywhere on the actual page itself.

The Importance Of Building Quality Backlinks – Then how is this page ranked in the top spot for this term?

It’s happening for one reason, and one reason only… a huge amount of backlinks have been built by webmasters from around the world, that link to this page. Want to guess what keyword phrase they’ve used when creating their links? That’s right… they’re linking the term, “Click Here,” to the specific page that is ranking in the first position!

As I write this, Yahoo reports that 2,927,761 links are pointing to this page.

This shouldn’t be taken to mean that you should abandon your on page optimization efforts, but it does reveal the power of anchor text backlinks. 

The more links you build to your pages that include your targeted keyword phrases, the more likely your pages are to rank well for the terms… it’s just that simple.

While there are a variety of ways to increase targeted website traffic, every business owner should consider optimizing their website for the search engines.

Instead of putting all of your eggs in one basket, it’s best to drive website traffic through several sources. This way, you can cast a wider net, resulting in more traffic, and track the efficacy of each source.

Before you begin, you should understand the core concepts of Search Engine Optimization (and Search Engine Marketing). In order to increase your website traffic and attract qualified prospects, you need to understand three things:

1. Everything related to SEO starts with an understanding of what a “keyword phrase” is.

Anytime someone conducts a search on Google, or another search engine, they enter some text to start their search. In SEO terms, the entered text is called a “keyword” or “keyword phrase.”

If you know what keyword phrases your prospects are entering when looking for the type of information, products or services you offer, you will know what phrases to optimize your web pages for.

2. Websites are not indexed or ranked by the search engines… each web page is indexed and ranked independent of any other.

This is commonly misunderstood but so vital to understand! Just because you have one web page that ranks really well in the search engines, that doesn’t mean that your others will also rank well.

Each page of your website must be uniquely optimized for a handful of keyword phrases… keyword phrases that are searched upon and those likely to attract your targeted audience.

If you pay close attention to the optimization of each page, you should see a dramatic improvement in terms of search engine placement.

3. Like it or not, you’re competing against others!

Some have a harder time with this concept than others but the truth remains the truth… in order to get your web page listed on page one of Google, you have to kick one of the currently listed web page’s off!

This is valuable information because it will help you understand what you must do to achieve the ranking you’re after. 

SEO Tips For Small Business Owners – Thorough analysis of the web pages currently listed for a particular keyword phrase will tell you how hard it will be to overtake one of them. You need to pay close attention to a number of elements including: 

• How well is their page optimized for the keyword phrase?

• How old is their domain (the older the better)?

• How many links can be found that point to the page (the more the better)?

While there are other elements involved, these three are of primary concern. If you find you can outdo your competitor’s web page in at least two of the three areas mentioned, you can probably kick them off the page and take their place.

After ensuring you are optimizing for a keyword phrase (or phrases) that are likely to bring you the kind of traffic you want, you’ll often find it is the quantity of backlinks that make the real difference.

SEO Tips For Small Business Owners – Of course, the quality of the backlinks is important too but if you are going to concentrate on one objective, it should be the building of links. Ensure your text links use the keyword phrases you are optimizing for and you’ll find you quickly climb the ranks of the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization is generally comprised of two distinctly different
activities… optimizing the website itself , referred to as “on page”
optimization, and increasing the authority of the website  in the eyes of the
search engines, referred to as “off page” optimization.

While both strategies must be employed for best effect, most SEO Consultants
begin with the on page optimization work before beginning their off page
optimization efforts.

In this article, I’ll cover some of the things that can be performed to your
website in order to increase its ability to achieve better rankings. First,
However, you must understand that each and every page of your website needs to be SEO’d. This will not pose too much difficulty if your website is rather small but if you have dozens (or hundreds) of pages, the work to be done will be substantial.

Here are eleven website factors that may affect your SEO:

Meta Title

Your “meta title” information is added to the page source (i.e. your website
coding). This may be done manually by your web designer or added through a
WYSIWYG editor if your site uses some form of Content Management System (aka CMS). On some dynamic platforms, the meta title is created automatically as soon as the page is published.

Generally speaking, your meta title should be kept relatively short (no more
than 60-80 characters) and should include the two-to-three keyword phrases you are specifically trying to optimize the page for.

Meta Page Description

Some may argue how much this affects SEO but there are other benefits to
writing a good meta page description as well. Google will only display the
first 156 characters (including spaces) of your page description so it’s best
to use that as your maximum length.

Your page description text should read well, include your primary keyword
phrase at minimum and be somewhat exciting. The page description will generally be shown to searchers just beneath the clickable title. If your description tells of a benefit or evokes curiosity in the reader, you will enhance your ability to get visitors.

Meta Keywords

Most will tell you that meta keywords are worthless when it comes to SEO and I would tend to agree.  However, if you are going to add meta keyword information I would recommend that you keep the amount to no more than about five terms in total.

It’s bad practice to add dozens of meta keywords to each page and you may
actually get penalized for doing so.

On Page Content

Your on page content should be unique to your website if at all possible and
should also include the keyword phrases you are targeting. You don’t need to
worry about the specific “keyword density” anymore as that is mostly a thing of the past but it does help to include the terms you are specifically targeting
at least once.

Your Web Page URL

If your website architecture allows you to control the name of each page, it’s
best to see that it includes your primary keyword phrase.

If you were targeting the term, “search engine optimization,” for example, you
might cause the url to be: domain.com/search-engine-optimization or even
domain.com/search-engine-optimization.html

Both examples work quite well so use whatever version is easiest for you to
achieve.

Your Web Design

You may be surprised to see “web design” included in this list but it can
affect your SEO in a variety of ways:

• Your design should be attractive and professional so as to keep your
  visitors on your site as long as possible .
• Your coding should be as “clean” as possible and should validate with
  the “W3C validation tool” whenever possible.
• Your images and coding should be optimized so as to maximize the speed of your site. This is good for both SEO and human visitors… no one likes to needlessly wait.

On Page Link Text

As you can control your on page link text, you can increase your optimization
for a term by using the term in the text link that points to your other page. 

The gain is generally considered minimal so this should only be done sparingly and only when the keyword phrase is relatively short.

Links Pointing To Other Sites

This topic may surprise you but most SEO Consultants agree… the search
engines’ believe that no one website is the “be all, end all” authority on a
topic and therefore expect a website to link to others on the same topic.

Of course, there is a downside to this practice… you may find that the visitor 

leaves and never comes back. An intelligent strategy is to link to
informational only sites, like Wikipedia, that do not provide competitive
products or services.

Visit Duration

Many search engines now track how long your visitors remain on your site. The longer the average is, the more apt the search engines are to believe your site is relevant to the keyword phrase that brought them to your web page in the first place.

Visit Depth

In addition to visit duration, they can also track how many pages of your site
the visitor looked at before leaving and which specific page they exited from.

You can see this data for yourself when viewing your web stats and can use the data to help you improve your visitor’s experience.

Page Load Speed

I touched on this when I spoke about web design but your page load speed is
also affected by the speed of your web hosting. It may not be a major factor,
but the search engines are paying attention to how long your pages take to
load.

It makes sense, really. The search engines do their best to deliver the best
possible visitor experience and if your pages take forever to load, it’s easy
to conclude that many are probably irritated as a direct result.

If you address the majority of the topics contained in this article, you’ll be
on your way to well-optimized pages. With a strong SEO framework, you’ll find that your off page optimization efforts yield better, and quicker results.

Search Engine Optimization really isn’t rocket science but there is a lot to know and consider when optimizing one’s website.

At the forefront is the understanding of keywords/keyword phrases and what affect they have on your ability to get targeted website traffic. 

What is a keyword/keyword phrase anyway?

It’s the word, or words, that internet users are typing in when they conduct an internet search. Fortunately for us, there are a variety of tools that keep track of this incredibly valuable data.

With that understood, here are some tips to help you choose the right keywords for your website… keywords that will draw the specific type of visitors you are looking for.

Keyword tools

There are a variety of keyword tools, both free and paid. Unless you are an SEO professional, you’ll probably want to use the free tool provided by Google.

To find it, simply conduct a search on Google for the term (aka keyword phrase), “Google Keyword Tool.” As Google has done its job to optimize for this keyword phrase, you’ll find it to be the first “organic” listing on page one of the results.

Search Volume

Search volume is an indicator that tells you how many times a particular keyword phrase is searched upon. The data is “search engine specific” so you will find that the numbers differ depending on which search engine’s data you are looking at.

It’s important to note that Google now tracks “local” and “global” search volume separately and can even tell you how frequently someone is searching the term with a mobile device.

Most SEO Consultants disagree as to the accuracy of the data so you should consider the data to be more “comparative” than accurate. For example, if “keyword phrase #1” is said to get 3,000 searches per month and “keyword phrase #2” is said to get 500, it’s safe to say that keyword phrase #1 is more searched upon.

Competition

It’s vital to remember that most search engines only show ten “organic” listings on any page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Because of this, you are competing with the websites/web pages that are already ranked for the keyword phrase(s) you have chosen.

In order to get your web page listed on “page one” for a particular keyword phrase, you are going to have to outperform one of your competitors.

There are many factors to consider when gauging competition but the main ones include:

• On-page Optimization – In other words, how well have they optimized their page around the keyword phrase(s) they are ranking for.
• Age of the domain – Generally speaking, the older the domain, the better.
• Domain extension – Although you can improve the SEO of any website, those with a .com, .org, .net, .edu, .gov or a country specific domain tend to rank better than those with other extensions.
• Inbound links – The amount of links the page has from other websites as well as those coming from other pages of the site itself.

Keyword Selection For Search Engine Optimization – Intent

Before finalizing your keyword list, it’s best to see if you can get into the mind of the person conducting the search. While your keyword research will tell you what keyword phrases are being searched upon, do you really know what they are looking for?

Keyword Selection For Search Engine Optimization – Here’s a real-world example:

Let’s say I wrote a book on emergency first aid and CPR and am looking for keyword phrases to promote my book. During my keyword research I find that the keyword phrase, “how to save a life,” is searched more than 40,000 times per month. I get excited because this phrase seems perfect for promoting my new book. But is it?

I dig a little deeper and find that this phrase will be meaningless for me. Why? It’s because the average searcher isn’t looking to actually save a life, they’re looking for information (lyrics, the music itself) for the song, “How To Save A Life” by The Fray!

The search volume is great, but the intentionality of the search is different than what it appears on the surface.

Keyword research is paramount to Search Engine Optimization and the ability to increase targeted website traffic. It’s best to avoid rushing in as this is the foundation for which all other SEO tactics will be built upon.