Search engines

APPLYING SEO (ALSO KNOWN AS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION) TO YOUR WEBSITE OR WEBSHOP/E-COMMERCE SITE IS FUNDAMENTAL TO ACHIEVING A GOOD GOOGLE RANKING.

OPTIMIZATION FOR GOOGLE

How much is SEO worth to your business?

Quick answer is that it’s invaluable. It’s not a question of should you bother… Strong search engine optimisation is imperative in today’s web-driven world. It’s likely the single most important factor for your ROI and the best investment in your marketing that you can make. So is your website or e-commerce site easily findable by your ideal customer?Will he or she land on your site when they type into Google what they’re looking for? If they don’t, your site is under-performing, and so, therefore, is your business. Read on how to achieve this successfully.

Test your website pages for SEO

Would you like to test out your webpages for their search engine strength? We’re currently offering everyone who registers with us a free daily webpage check with our own analysis programme, SEO Page Optimizer, which then provides you with a detailed search engine optimisation report as to what you need to change within your on-page content structure to get at least as high as Google’s top 10 rankings. To use it, you’ll need to tell us the core keywords you want that site page to rank for organically. Often there are simple measures you can take to improve its ranking and SEO Page Optimizer will deliver you step-by-step advice on these. Click here to register and get better SEO.

Inbound links for free?

Would you like to increase your website visibility? Google’s spiders (and those of other search engines) all track the inbound links you’ve gained from other websites and see them as votes of endorsement. If you can get people to mention you and link to your site, your website will rank higher in the organic results. The more inbound links you have, the better your website’s search engine optimization. We’ve designed a specialized service called Keyboost that researches and seeks out high-quality links relevant to your site. We explain the process in more detail below but if you would like to boost your search engine optimisation and sign up for a free Keyboost trial, simply click to go to our application form here. Our only condition is that your webpage has a position within Google’s top 10 pages (ie. top 100 rankings) for your target keyword. (If yours isn’t, then take advantage of SEO Page Optimizer to get your on-page content up to scratch and improve your rankings). Improve your website’s Google score with Keyboost’s free trial. Go to the Keyboost application form here.

The value of a strong Google ranking

A good position with Google will pull more visitors to your website or e-commerce site. Strong search engine optimisation is one of the cheapest and most effective marketing strategies you can employ to get more customers landing on it. More visitors (as long as you’re using the right keywords to draw in the right kind of customers or people interested in your site) means more leads or purchases. If you’re starting out your with search engine optimisation journey, then reaching the number 1 position in Google’s index might seem out of your reach. But if you follow our advice, you’ll find it’s not impossible – and certainly not to get a ranking on the first page. The first page of Google is where you need to be. Page 1 receives 91.5% of all traffic, compared to 4.8% on page 2. If you do get to page 1, the first three positions is where you should aspire to be. They bag more than 50% of the clicks, with number 1 getting 29.6% (that’s nearly one in three searchers); number 2 getting 13.1% and number 3 getting 9.2%. The bottom-line value of search engine optimisation is how it drives traffic, leads, and sales for your business. Register now. Take advantage of a free analysis of one of your webpages with our custom-built tool, SEO Page Optimizer, and see your webpage move up the Google rankings.

12 reasons to use SEO Page Optimizer

Our page analysis tool has been developed by us by our specialist technicians to match the algorithmic methods for indexing used by Google so you can be sure that by using it, you’re getting your pages assessed exactly as Google does.
It processes your target keyword and analyses the top 10 pages in Google and then stacks up your page against them. It then delivers back to you any alterations you need to make to be on at least a par with their on-page content or better.
It’s simple to use and intuitive. Use it and you’ll be producing content to the standards of an expert web copywriter.
Once you’ve registered, you get one free analysis every day. That’s Monday to Sunday, so 365 free analyses a year. If you decide you require more analyses, these can be ordered from us easily online.
You get actionable instructions on better use of your keyword.
You receive a series of the best keyword-related words and synonyms you should be feeding into your content.
You’ll have on screen a full and actionable report, indicating where your web page is strong and where it is weaker, for each separate on-page content element.
Each content element is awarded an easily-understandable colour-coded mark in the form of red (needs improvement); amber (getting closer); green (very good) and blue (perfect).
The tool doesn’t just highlight the areas for improvement. It gives you detailed instructions as to what you should do to refine the content and grades you on it. Once you’ve made the suggested changes, you can upload your page for a further check through and discover if you’ve scored the blue thumbs up symbol. Hurrah!
The detail the tool goes into is deep. It even gives you the ideal number of words for your alt-tags and suggests how many keywords and related words you should use in it.
It helps you formulate the best anchor text for your page and which keywords and related words you should use within it.
Once you’ve made the recommended changes, you’ll see an immediate improvement in your Google ranking.

What have you got to lose? Steal a march on your competitors’ websites and grab the benefit of the added value that our Page Optimizer tool offers. Register now and test one of your web pages for free, daily.

How Google's engine ranks you

Google has said publicly that it uses about 200 different search engine optimisation factors to rank each website. While this may seem daunting, the good news is that many of these factors are pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things. But two predominant factors, everyone agrees, are so important that they will make or break the success of your website. What are they? One is on-page and the other is off-page. They’re roughly of equal ranking importance. The on-page factor is having correctly formatted keyword-optimized content. The off-page factor is inbound links – that’s the number of other website domains and pages linking to your site. If you focus on getting these two factors as strong as you possibly can, you multiply your chances of ranking on Google’s page 1 exponentially.

Inbound links for stronger SEO and visibility

Getting quality inbound links to your website is something that will happen slowly and steadily in a natural way providing your content is informative and useful. That’s because people will want to link to it and share it. But not all links are considered equal by Google. It judges them on their relevancy, trust and authority. Here we’ll explain a little more:

The number of linking domains: Google judges the actual number of domains linking to you as one of the most significant ranking factors.
The number of linking pages: There’s a difference here. You might have one domain linking to you from several of its pages. But Google sees your site as far more valuable if you’ve attracted more links from different domains rather than from a single one.
Domain Authority of linking page: Google is constantly assessing the web’s domains and some of them it gives what’s known as a higher domain authority. These are the ones you should be aiming at to get backlinks from, as opposed to low authority domains. What are high domain authority websites? They tend to be those that have proven themselves and have many valuable inbound links themselves. Sites of professional organizations or media outlets such as the BBC or Huffington Post are high authority domains, as are sites ending in .edu and .gov. One link from a high domain authority site is worth a lot more than lots of links from sites of low authority.
Link relevancy: It’s mostly thought that links from pages which share the same subject as your page topics score higher in search engines’ ranking scale.
The number of do follow vs. nofollow links. Google has said that they don’t count no-follow links (link with rel=nofollow attribute attached) for ranking so the more do-follow links you can get will up your rankings. If you comment on a blog post and include your website url, this is likely to be given a no-follow link by the blog owner (as he’s not endorsing your url) but no-follows are still worth getting as they get your brand name out there and they will attract you more visitors – and that’s a factor Google does take into consideration.
The mix of link types: It’s good to get a variety of links coming to your site. If you have lots of backlinks of one type, Google may see them as spam and this will affect your rankings negatively.

Slow and steady backlink building

So backlinks are hugely important for search engine optimisation but they’re time-consuming to win and are generally built up slowly over time as you expand the content on your site and do the outreach work needed to connect with other websites. However, we can help you create quality inbound links with our custom tool, Keyboost, which will raise your rankings with Google. Ours is not a quick fix however. And that’s a good thing. You should beware if a company offers you an ‘instant’ backlink package. The chances are you’ve found yourself dealing with an unscrupulous link farm that will place machine-generated indiscriminate low-quality links to your site that might set Google’s alarm bells jangling and result in your site being penalized. Keyboost, on the other hand, is driven by humans – our own specialist technicians – who take a professional and circumspect approach to link-building. We ask you for your target keyword and niche area and then we painstakingly research the Web to find exclusively sites that have a direct relevance to yours and that are of high trust and authority. The process is meticulous and takes up to a month to complete but by the end of it, most website owners are thrilled with the results and see a significant rise in their rankings. Check out our testimonials to learn more. We’re proud to say the organic search results progress our 'Keyboosters' get are far better than they could get with even paid advertising such as Google AdWords. And it’s much cheaper too. We’re currently offering right now a free trial per domain (website url) for every new customer that registers with us. We do ask though that your website is at least in Google’s top 100 (ie. within the first 10 ranking pages) for your target keyword. To register now for a free Keyboost trial, simply click here to go to our application form, fill in your url details and target keyword, and we’ll soon be in touch.

Want to dig deeper and learn more?

Our newsletter regular series is free to receive too. These will arrive every week into your inbox. We've carefully organized the educational lessons so that each one builds on the next to increase your search engine optimisation understanding. They explain things in simple terms – no Geek speak, we promise! We serve you bite-size explanations that you'll be able to put into practice yourself for your own website. Getting your website performing well, we believe, doesn’t need to be complicated, once you understand the basics. After you've digested them, you'll have a much clearer grasp of the content html elements that Google sees as important such as the title tag, heading tags (h1, h2, h3) etc, meta description and alt tag. You'll also grasp how to better employ layout and structure for your webpages. You'll comprehend how to choose the right keywords for your specific customers or visitors and how to go about researching these. You'll get the hang of how and where to use calls-to-action too to get the right actions from your target visitors. Subscribe to our newsletter series for easily understandable lessons on:

12 reasons to use Keyboost

You can expect your organic search rankings to improve significantly within one month or less
It costs nothing to trial providing the webpage you want us to lift in the rankings for a target keyword is within Google’s top 100 results for that keyword or you’ve improved that page for SEO using our SEO Page Optimizer
Keyboost’s specialist technicians add the links to your site from the back end. That means you don’t have to do anything, nor is there any need to alter the content on your website
The only work we ask of you is that you inform us of your target keyword and your target web page
You don’t have to worry about the quality of the links you’ll receive. They are all good quality
You’ll be getting the advantage of the specialized research and placement skills of our expert staff
You can have full confidence that the backlinks that Keyboost gives you are totally relevant to your topic area and from sites of comparable relevance, high trust and authority
The high-quality backlinks you get will boost your site’s reputation and authority
You’ll get better results than if you were to opt for paid advertising such as Google AdWords and the trial will cost you nothing.
You’re mining the expertise of one of Europe’s most successful IT agencies, with more than 15 years experience behind it.
Thanks to Keyboost, any given webpage (say, top 30 in Google) can reach the first page with organic search results. On average, a keyword that is in the top 30 can enter into the top 10. .
A keyword that is in the top 20 can enter the top 5, and one that is in the top 10 can usually enters the top 3.

Intrigued to try out Keyboost for yourself for better SEO? Simply fill in the application form here to register with us and we’ll be in touch.

Need more professional help?

Our company has been in the search engine optimization field for over 15 years. We've now carved ourselves a niche as one of Europe's leading search engine optimization consultancies. In that time, to help our customers secure their best Google rankings possible, we’ve kept bang up to date on how Google analyses web data for optimization. We're a team of IT specialists who specialize in understanding the indexing processes that Google uses. Our optimization tools, Keyboost and SEO Page Optimizer, have been long in development and are the result of the expert knowledge we’ve accumulated. We're now opening their use up to all our customers in free trial format. However, if you feel that you need more help then we also offer a consultancy service and are able to provide you with a full site audit and help with your digital marketing strategy. You can contact us here to improve your search engine optimisation. What kind of aspects do we consider when we carry out a website audit for our customers? Some of these, for starters:

What are the core keywords you want your site to rank for organically? What are the measures you could take to improve these?
What’s the overall health of your site? Are there important errors that should be sorted? We’ll consider elements such as technical factors (hosting, server metrics, down time, cache-ing); on-site (content, design, metas, schema tags, URL construction, page speed); current state of links (both Internal and external); social media (your profiles, optimization, links).
Is your site mobile responsive? This is now a hefty ranking factor for Google so if your site isn’t adapted for mobile use, you’re going to be losing out.
Are there any flaws in your site architecture that could be affecting your rankings and content coverage?
Do you have applications such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console set up?
Do you have PPC campaigns ongoing so we can access your Adwords accounts to audit your campaigns?
Who are your competitors and what opportunities are there for site growth?

Why not talk your issues with one of our consultants? We’ll assess your site and one of our SEO specialists will discuss your SEO specific circumstances. We know that every website faces different challenges and has different markets. If you need help improving SEO and search visibility, contact us directly at info@seopageoptimizer.co.uk or call +44 3308 084797.

The importance of keywords

To promote your company or your products on the web, you need to draw visitors to your site. The more visitors you get, the better the opportunity you get to persuade them to work with your or to move them through your buying cycle. But you have to attract your target visitor. You don’t want the kind of visitors who are going to just pop in and then disappear because they’ve not found what they’re looking for – or to ‘bounce’ from your page. Getting a grip on your ‘buyer persona’ (your ideal target customer) and understanding your customers’ behaviour is essential to the process of working out the keywords you should use. When you determine the keywords to use, go for the ones that your customers would choose. They might be different from the ones you would say.

Keyword strategy

So how do you find the best keywords? Begin by actually asking your customers or colleagues. Study your main social media, or any other platforms such as LinkedIn if they are in your field, and check out conversations. Look at relevant forums, comments and blogs to see the terms people are using. Google Autocomplete is worth a look too. It gives you real life searches by other people. Then check out the choice of keyword search tools you can use. Some you have to subscribe too; some are free. Google AdWords Keyword Planner is free but a little limited in range. You only require a Google account to use it. Put in a keyword or keyword phrase and it will deliver search volume (how often it is used) and the competition (how many others are trying to rank for that phrase). Here’s a method to follow to do this: develop and brainstorm a seed list of keyword terms; then build on your list using keyword research tools; then refine your list with competitive research to decide which keywords are worth your chasing.

Sort your keywords into three categories:

Transactional – The user already wants act in some way – to buy, sign up, or get more info. For example, buy iPhone 6 or learn the guitar.
Informational – The user wants to find something out. For example, ‘nearest MOT garage to Henley’?
Navigational – The user knows exactly where they're going on the Web. For example, Barclays Bank website or HMS Revenue.

Transactional keywords are the ones to focus on for optimization because they show user intent– in other words, your visitor wants to do what you’re offering, whether it’s ‘buy vintage wedding dress, London’ or ‘study search engine optimization course, Manchester’.

The benefits of related words

When you’re writing or optimising the copy for your website, try to add in synonyms of or related words to your keywords to help Google grasp what your pages are about. Hopefully, you’ll do this naturally – and it’s important that your text sounds natural and is well written, rather than wooden and keyword-controlled. So don’t make the mistake that you have to inject the keywords you want to optimise for as many times as possible on a page. If you end up focusing too much on cramming in the single, exact match version of your keywords, you’ll end up writing badly. It’s much better to use related words and synonyms of your keywords. Related words are all important as a result of Google’s growing understanding of user intent. It doesn’t just match keywords in isolation. Google has sophisticated its comprehension of all content to better understand the phrases, search history and other elements of a query to better respond to a user’s priorities when they search. That means they have optimized their search ranking algorithm and user experience to get closer to delivering what data users really want. Natural inclusion of synonyms and related words in your content is a big part of this and of helping your content optimize better for your actual target keywords. If you use SEO Page Optimizer, then the good news is that the tool will actually provide you with the current top-ranking related words to your keyword. So you can choose from these to write your web page content in a more optimized way. Would you like to improve the page content of a web page today? Then grab the benefit of the free page analysis we offer everyone who registers with us with SEO Page Optimizer. Simply type in your url, your target keyword, language and target country and then follow the recommendations the checker tool delivers you. It’s a simple and effective way of improving your organic search results. Register here for free. Give your page a search engine results boost with Keyboost’s link-building service.Do you have a web page that you’re happy with but it’s not achieving the ranking you’re hoping for in Google? Click to register and we’ll help you make your search engine results improve. Just complete the form and insert the keyword you want to rank for.

Let's recap

We’ve explained a lot on this page. But read on to put all this learning into perspective. Website strategy is not just about having the right keywords on your website – crucial as this is. As a website owner and business person, you should really try to grasp the fundamentals of SEO. It's the craft and process of optimizing your website for search engines to increase your organic search results. The phrase SEO is these days on the lips of anyone who has a business with a website. Your website is your business and your shop front or calling card. First impressions count and it's probably the first way your customers or visitors meet your brand. We’re all brands these days and we all have to have a USP that makes us in some way different from the competition. Your website is your most powerful selling tool.

Website nuts and bolts

Making sure the main technical and structural elements of your website are in place is important:

Website loading speed – this is a factor that Google considers for ranking
Mobile responsiveness – this can’t be ignored today and is also an indexing factor
Using keywords in your page URLs
Having a site map that automatically updates
Making available a robots.txt file for the search engines

Content strategy

Aim to provide strong, unique, and fresh SEO content focused around your keywords for every page. It needs to be appropriate to the keywords. Remember to use plenty of synonyms and related words. Your content needs to be structured well, with the keywords used in the best places. This means using all the online content elements correctly such as the heading tags (h1, h2, h3), page titles and meta descriptions of the correct character length, use of alt-tags, anchor text and more. Remember that SEO Page Optimizer can direct you how to do this. To receive a free analysis of the content of your webpages, simply register here . Make sure it’s original text too that you or your website copywriter have created from scratch. Google is quick to pick up on duplicate copy and will penalize it. Also try to add new content as often as you can. Google sees this as a positive sign that your site is active. One of the easiest ways to do this is to post a regular blog and these you can and should keyword optimize too. Remember, the more content you create, the greater your chances of being found by your target visitors. What's the secret to good content? Here are a few guidelines that will help you write Google-friendly content:

Stay focused and ensure that your content delivers what it says in the title. If your title is “How to make sure your website has its search engine optimization spot-on” write your post so that it really delivers all it promises.
Proofread your content and then again for typos, spelling and grammar errors. Ask someone else to read through it for you. It’s easy to miss mistakes in the copy you write yourself.
Format your text with all the on-page elements correctly and with your keywords structured within it. That means you use H1 tags for the main title of your post and then h2, h3, h4 etc tags for the main headings of your post.
Make good use of bold and Italics to make your main messages to stand out.
Keep the text scannable: use bullet points and write small paragraphs. Try to keep it to one idea per paragraph. Choose an easily readable font and make the font size big enough to be quickly read.
When you have written your content, don’t just publish. Instead take a look at your copy and think about helping your visitors navigate about your site through links within your content to other pages on your site so that they can quickly access more information.

What length for your web content? The answer to this is that it varies but it’s generally felt that you should aim for at least 450 words on a web page. But a blog post can be much longer especially if it’s an in-depth well-researched subject. But don’t write a long post if it’s not necessary. You should think about your readers and make the post as engaging and interesting as possible. Be guided by this, not by the goal of getting to a certain word count. Think quality, not quantity. Google actually gives some really good guidelines here about what it sees as strong content.It makes clear that short content also has its place and can do well in the organic search results too.

Link-building strategy

Google uses inbound link analysis as a very strong indexing factor so it matters who is pointing to your website. It’s a sign of your reputation and every other website that links to yours is effectively endorsing its content. The more quality links you can get in, ideally, related fields to yours, the higher your website’s authority will become and the higher you’ll rank in the organic search results. Google uses these links to determine the popularity of websites and their authority. These inbound links take time to build up but a few tactics are these:

Ask your customers to link to you
Run a regular blog that’s engaging and informative and share it on your social media platforms
Boost the blog's value by producing the content in different formats such as video, slideshows or white papers and share it again
Do some outreach work to other websites by telling them about your great content or offering to guest post for them in return for a do-follow link

Link-building is time consuming and requires you to be patient and persistent. If you’d like some help building your inbound links, our link-builder service Keyboost is totally free to trial. Our specialist technicians will research link opportunities for you in your niche and secure you only high-quality and relevant links from sites of authority. To see for yourself the ranking difference quality links can make, you can register here for a Keyboost trial.

Three actions worth doing

Track your visitor behaviour: It’s sensible and valuable to do this because it helps you understand your customers and visitors. Using Google Analytics means you can collect data about their behavior such as where they are from, how they got to your site and what pages they are visiting the most. Use it to make your website a better sales tool.
Show off your testimonials: Let your happy customers do the talking for you. They’ll do it in a more natural way than you do and people put a lot of store by other people’s opinions. So get in the habit of asking for testimonials and why people were pleased with your service. They help build trust, they don’t seem salesy and they convince people and reduce skepticism.
Collect email addresses: It’s well worth collecting email addresses and building a newsletter list. Email marketing a powerful online marketing channel and it’s cheap to do too with email marketing software. So think about offering a newsletter sign-up from your homepage and encourage people by offering something useful that shares your knowledge such as a whitepaper or e-book in return for their email address.

Keyboost offers you the opportunity to dramatically increase your site's online visibility