Search engine optimization is the name we give to all the activities and techniques that you as a website owner can do to improve your search engine rankings.
What is the secret to your website's success?
It's SEO or search engine optimization. SEO is what you do to get your website higher in Google’s index and increase your online visibility. And with that, of course, come more visitors, more conversions and more ROI. SEO is often seen as some mysterious black art. But that’s hardly surprising when it’s so little understood by anyone who isn’t an SEO expert. Add to that all the technical SEO terms and unfamiliar SEO language that the technique involves – no wonder a lot of people are daunted by it! It all might seem like the big secret that everybody out there understands except for you. But in reality it’s not so complicated. The good news is that once you’ve grasped the basic tenets of it, you won’t have to be a technical expert to get its full benefits. Really! Yet Google uses over 200 ranking factors in its ranking algorithms to assess my SEO you might be thinking? That’s true – it does. But do you know something else? To many people, Google is the internet. It's certainly the search engine that calls all the shots and that dominates the market. Since its invention, there have been multiple algorithmic updates. The biggest recent ones are known as Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird. Yet while Google and the other search engines have developed and changed over the years, the bottom-line principles have stayed the sameand have not significantly altered the basics of search engine optimization, nor how Google crawls and indexes the Web.
The two core fundamentals of website search optimisation
SEO really boils down to understanding the two fundamental areas that underpin it. Get these two right and you are covering your most important bases and much more likely to get your website onto Google’s page number one. What are they? They are:
- Your keywords strategy – this involves using the right keywords in the right places in your on-page content.
- Your backlinks strategy – this involves having other websites boost your online ‘reputation’ by linking to your website.
If you’ve already done your keyword research and you’re already targeting certain keyword phrases for each of your pages, would you like to check if you’re using them enough and in the most valuable places?
Click here to request a free offer
Free analysis tool to get your keywords right
What are keywords? They’re the words and phrases that identify what people are searching for and that, once identified, you use in the best positions in your web page content. We’ve created in-house a free optimization tool that gives you a simple way to know if you are using your keywords correctly and in the most important places in your content. You can test out each page on your website by using our intelligent SEO Page Optimizer analysis tool. It’s intuitive to use and will mean you can improve each of your web pages’ content for better online visibility. It’s also totally free. SEO Page Optimizer works by sending its own ‘bots’ to crawl your website content in exactly the way that Google does. It then compares your webpage with the top 10 pages in Google’s search results for your target keyword phrase. It will then grade and improve your website wording. It highlights any errors you’re making and suggests improvements. You follow the step-by-step report it delivers to get better performance results for the content on each of your pages. We make available one free webpage analysis per day. Why not test it out on a page of your website – start with your home page, for example, and see exactly how your content is performing for its online effectiveness?
Or ask for a free offer here
What is our company and its expertise base?
Our experienced SEO team – we’re a geeky and friendly bunch – was formed over 15 years ago. We’ve grown and learned apace with the development of the Internet (and seen multiple Google updates in that time). We now have offices across Europe: in the Netherlands, France, Belgium and the UK. Our UK headquarters is located in East Finchley in London.We operate as a full service digital marketing company with the full range of services, including SEM and PPC. We also provide an information resource and a number of free do-it-yourself SEO tools for driving more traffic to your site. You can contact us using the details on the page below or use our live chat facility. You can also call us at +44 3308 084797 or e-mail: info@seopageoptimizer.co.uk
Introducing Keyboost: a free backlinks creator service
The external links coming into your own website, known as backlinks, are the other crucial element that influences your website's findability and ultimately, conversion rate. The quantity and quality of these backlinks allow search engines to calculate the authority and popularity of your site. The more you have of quality backlinks, the higher Google and any other search engine will rank you. Ranking without backlinks is, frankly, very difficult. So how do I get those backlinks you’re asking? We’ll come to the best tactics for that shortly but we can also help you now. We have designed a backlinks creator service called Keyboost that is run by our team of in-house technicians. Our customers who use it gain a hike in their rankings quickly. Most users see a significant difference in their SERPs ranking in under a month. We find that a site in the Google top 30 can normally achieve a top 10 listing. Here’s how it works, Keyboost is run by our specialist technicians. They require from you, via our online form, your target keyword and the URL of your web page. They then get to work researching your website’s subject area. They seek out strong sites in your niche area from which to place backlinks to increase your website's visibility and effectiveness. They identify only genuine and strong backlink opportunities for you from relevant sites to yours that have page authority.
Our SEO guarantee to you
As our guarantee to you, we give each customer one free Keyboost test per domain. Please note, each Keyboost test is valid only providing your webpage has a top 100 position in Google for your target keyword phrase (ie. You type in your keyword and your website appears in the SERPs results in any of Google’s top 10 pages). Once you’ve seen for yourself that your ranking has gained a significant boost and you then want further Keyboosts for more website pages, we will invite you to receive a quotation. Don’t worry. Our costs are very reasonable and in all instances far cheaper (and more effective) than using PPC such as Google Adwords. We do charge more for more competitive generic keywords however. But if you read on below about the best tactics for your keyword strategy, you’ll see that using generic keywords with high competition is not, in any case, your best SEO approach. You should be aiming to find the relevant (and less competitive) long-tail keywords for maximum search engine optimization clout. Test out Keyboost for yourself now. .
Sign up for our informative newsletter series
Our company has accumulated 15 years of experience with digital performance techniques. You can access our knowledge base too. Each month we prepare freshly updated content for our subscriber-base via two free monthly newsletters that cover dual different aspects of search engine optimization.We divide them into two categories:
- ’The secrets of Google unraveled’. This looks at the way the search engine crunches all the information on the internet to give users the most useful and relevant search results and explains how you can organize your content to deliver the best website performance.
- ’More customers from your website’. This looks at the most powerful ways you can market your business and attract new customers to your site.
Sign up for our FREE newsletters today and receive regular practical tips to help you achieve search engine optimization success online.
What’s the ultimate test of good SEO?
You know you’ve got everything right when your web page is consistently where you want it to be in the organic results. For most people, this is on Google’s first page. It’s important to realise how Google ‘thinks’. Google will only deliver up web pages to searchers that are relevant to the keyword being typed in. So your first step is to make sure you are using your keywords correctly and that your web pages’ content is all about the keyword in question. If it's not, your pages aren’t likely not to feature in Google’s all-important top 10. You can certainly pay for ads to be seen on top of Google’s listing (although these have to be keyword-optimized correctly too). But most website users tend to trust organic results far more than paid ads. Organic is undoubtedly better for delivering relevant traffic. Your aim should always be to increase your organic click-through rates (CTR) by trying to use the right keywords to meet your searcher’s true intent. That means giving them high-quality content, and by writing headlines and meta descriptions and the other important on-page elements wellso that it clear what you’re about for both your human visitors and Google. So how do you do that?
Click here for a free offer
Get your keywords nailed down first
Your website starts with your choice of keywords. So you should always begin with keyword research. Keyword research is vital to unearth the real search queries that your ideal customer or visitor will type into a search engine box. When you have the low-down on these search terms, you can use it to base your website content around and as the guide for your SEO content marketing strategy. So start by brainstorming the keywords and the topics you know will be relevant to your customers. If you have staff, ask for their input too. Look at or run an audit of your competitor sites to see what are the keywords they’re targeting. Think outside your own terminology – you will be steeped in it but it might well not mean anything to your target customers. Check out customer reviews to get sense of the type of words they use. It might surprise you that they don’t use the same words you do! You may be an architect offering ‘architectural services’ to homeowners but is this likely to be what your customers will be typing in? Probably not. A little searching and you’ll discover they’re phrases like “planning a single storey extension” or “extension planner”. Then dig deeper by using a keyword research tool. The best free one is Google Keyword Planner but there are a choice of more complex paid tools available. Alternatively you can pay a keyword research specialist to do the digging for you because really targeted keyword research can be an elaborate and time-consuming task. Your goal is to ferret out those keywords with lower competition that are relevant to your website or business. Say you’re an architect who specializes in drawing up cost-effective plans for people who want home extensions in the south London area. You are going to be wanting to write pages that will attract the right traffic. So you should be looking for long-tail keywords such as ‘affordable architect for home extensions, south London area’ (putting in your location will exclude you from competing against the whole of the country) or ‘cheap architect extension plans, south London’. Why are theselong tail keywords so much better for your online strategy? It’s because they are relevant to your unique business and target customers. It is true that they will attract less traffic to your site than a sweeping generic term. But the people who arrive at your site will already be 'qualified'. They know exactly what they need from you so they are the visitors more likely to have a genuine interest in what you’re offering and to complete your call-to-action. That might be to fill in your enquiry box, download your pricing sheet or sign up to your newsletter etc. How many keywords should you have per web page for best performance and effect? Ideally, just one keyword phrase, which you’ll bolster using synonyms and related phrases to make it doubly clear to Google what your page topic is. (If you’re unsure about what related words or synonyms to use, check out the suggestions that SEO Page Optimizer offers you.) You choose one long-tail keyword phrase for each website page and have it appear in your content in the right places. So which places are these? Do you want to check if you’re already using your keywords in the most valuable places in your content? You can do this by using our smart SEO Page Optimizer tool. You can then follow the instructions it gives to better optimize the content for search on any of your web pages. Everyone gets one free analysis per day. Try it out now on any page of your site for optimisation.
The critical places for keywords in your website content
If you’ve already got your website copy up and on your site, then start checking the most visited pages of your site first and positioning your keywords correctly. Main content: Here you shouldn’t go overboard with your keyword phrase. Use it where it feels natural and remember to add in synonyms and related words and add qualifiers to your keywords such as ‘cheapest’, ‘highest-quality’ or your location such as ‘in Manchester’ for example. Title tag: This is what comes up on the search engine result page and in the top bar of an internet browser. Try to keep this to 65 or 70 characters as otherwise it might get truncated by Google. Make it search-friendly. Put your keywords first to make it clear to Google what your web page topic is about. So in our example above, you might use Home extensions architect services | South London. If there’s space, you could use your brand name but remember your company name will also show in the URL. Having your keywords in your title tag will help increase your CTR from the search results. Meta description: This doesn’t affect your rankings but it does make people more likely to click on your site if you can write this enticingly. It is what you see below the title tag in the search results. Include keywords to encourage people to understand what your page is about. How long should it be for maximum effect? These used to be limited to 155 characters but Google is now showing more of these snippets. A Google spokesperson is quoted as saying: “We recently made a change to provide more descriptive and useful snippets, to help people better understand how pages are relevant to their searches. This resulted in snippets becoming slightly longer, on average.” That said, on mobile, the meta description tends to be cut at 110 characters so to cover yourself write a meta description that makes good sense at 110 characters and then add another sentence taking it up to 300 characters. Headings and sub-heads (h1 and h2 etc): Google will crawl these and use the headings to understand the hierarchy and topic of your webpage. These are highly valuable on-page positions to insert your keywords but make sure they make sense. ALT tags: The alt tag tells search engine crawlers what your image is and this helps it be found in search. So do use your keywords in your alt tags if you can find a relevance as it all helps reveal to Google what your site topic is all. Anchor text: What is this? It’s the words you choose to link either to another site from or to another page on your site. It’s also a way to lead Google across your site with your anchor text. This is a straightforward digital stratagem. So don’t just say ‘click here’ when you’re hyperlinking to another page but make use of your keyword or variations of it as the anchor text. So in our example we might use ‘architect services’ as anchor text and ‘home extensions planning’. It all helps to signal to Google the keywords you want to be ranked for. Bold and italics:Take the time to emphasize the value of your keywords by making them bold or placing them in italics. Again these are useful indicators to Google.
Need help with your keywords and your SEO?
If you’re struggling to determine which keywords you should prioritize for your site to rank higher for search, we can help with this and your overall website performance and online visibility. We offer either a complete SEO service or a packaged service that’s tailored to your needs. To find out more, visit us here: You can check out our keywords assistance and SEO service here and also request a comprehensive keyword search via this link. We’ll get in touch with you and then we generally determine for you two types of keywords:
- The keywords you can add in to optimize your existing page content without changing your website
- The best keywords for your website's findability to base new pages upon
Get the keyword and search engine optimization help you need here.
The powerful connection between SEO and backlinks
To give you an understanding of the importance of backlinks for website visibility, know that it is almost impossible to find any websites that rank competitively without backlinks. When you have backlinks pointing to your site, it’s known as your backlink profile and it’s something you should aim to build for better website performance. Every backlink you receive from another site Google views as a signal of your website’s value and popularity. So it will rank the site higher. That said, you should not be trying to get backlinks from just any other website on the Internet. The ones that will give you most findability and uplift value are those that come from reputable sites in the same niche area as yours. In other words, the topics of the domains backlinking to your site should be relevant to your own content. Each link to your site is perceived by Google as a 'vote of endorsement' or a public 'seal of approval'. The more decent links you can secure, the stronger your website will perform in the SERPs. Google will then grant your site a higher position in the search results. So your backlinks must come from websites of repute and must have a relevance to your content topics and your target keywords.What are easiest ways to attract backlinks to your site to get a raise in Google's index?
- Create solid and quality content on your website that’s so informative that other website owners will want to share and link to it naturally. Really good content will naturally attract backlinks and social media shares.
- Share your own content on your social media platforms: every time you publish a new blog or web page, let people know about it via your chosen platforms, be it Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn or any other.
- Write detailed articles in your blog section covering the problems and concerns of your users and use your keywords or variations of them in these.
- Guest blog and become a contributor on the most popular websites in your niche area so you become known as an authority and so your URL is listed and backlinked to at the end of the article.
- Make it easy for people to share what you’re publishing with social media sharing links or widgets on your web pages.
- Get your business listed on relevant industry directories and also on local directories, which is also good for your local findability.
If you’ve recently created your website, or you’ve not yet paid any attention to building your backlinks profile, you need to be patient. Backlinks do take time and effort to accumulate. You can achieve more, however, with the help of our smart backlinks creator and online reputation service Keyboost. Our Keyboost service is managed in-house by our SEO technicians. When you sign up to Keyboost, they will do the research needed to find the websites of most value to you for backlinks optimisation. Our work doesn’t have an instant effect. It takes time to do this probing search engine optimisation groundwork but you can generally expect to rank higher in Google with Keyboost within four weeks of our starting a backlinks analysis for you. Try Keyboost for free optimisation results.
How to use our Keyboost backlinks creator service
- You fill in our online form with your target keyword and web page url.
- We begin our fact-finding for your keyword to ascertain the most appropriate sites from which to secure you backlinks.
- We pinpoint the most relevant websites in your industry or business sector from which you would gain an advantage with a backlink and secure those links.
We will normally have boosted your backlink profile within four weeks – in which time you will be able to see a strong difference in your search engine results. Keyboost is a very effective service that focuses on creating a natural backlink profile so the work is done gradually. Slow and steady is our mantra when it comes to building backlinks to give you results that will endure and bring in a continuous stream of greater traffic volumes to your website. You can try our Keyboost service here for free to optimize better for search. The free Keyboost test means you can get a clear idea of the kind of website improvement and search optimisation results that an investment in link building could bring you. It also means we can do the necessary groundwork to supply you with quote to continue with further link building for you if you decide you would like to have our Keyboost technicians continue to further boost your site after your free trial has ended. Sign up for the free Keyboost test here. You will be impressed by the optimisation results and your improved position in Google's index.
Other optimisation factors not to ignore
So now you understand about the SEO weight of keyword placement and quality content, as well as the vital importance of the role of backlinks. But don’t neglect these other areas of your site which also have an impact on your website's visibility and business success.
- Is your website mobile friendly? This is becoming increasingly important as the number of searches performed on smartphones is rising month on month. Make sure your site has responsive design (this means it can be viewed clearly on all devices: desktop, tablets and mobile. Your site should be optimized for mobile devices and easy to navigate so make sure the buttons are large enough to be swiped. Stay clear of Flash which doesn’t work on mobile and don’t be tempted to use pop-ups which are annoying on mobiles and discouraged by Google.
- How is your page speed? This is another important website performance element. Your web pages should load fast on all devices and especially for mobile. Mobile users are the least forgiving of slow loading pages!
- Do you have keywords in your domain name and URLs? This helps both people and Google grasp your web page topic so do include keywords in your domain name and URLs if you can.
- Are your pages secure? Google HTTPS ranking is now a must. What is it? It’s also known as SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and it means your site is safe over unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. Moving your site over however if you’re HTTP now can be a time-consuming job with many redirects so you might need professional help.
Writing the most effective web content
- Remember that all web users have short attention spans and are much more likely to skim your content instead of reading it. So make it easy for them.
- Aim to put your most important messages near the top of your page: your reader may go no further. Stick to one main topic per web page that matches your target keyword phrase.
- Don’t use complex language. Is there a simpler word you can use? It’s the commoner and shorter words that work best for the web. So try and keep your sentences and paragraphs concise and short and get straight to the point. Write like Hemingway did and keep the tone conversational.
- Use plenty of headings and sub-headings (they are a good place to put your keywords!) and use them in such a way that if a reader is going to scan your page fast, he or she will quickly grasp what the page is about. Organize your thoughts and make these headings have a logical progression. Make them lively – questions work well as do headings that offer the promise of answers.
- Keep your content divided into short chunks. Long passages on the web are hard to read. Even if you have lengthy paragraphs, you can make them more readable by placing a space or paragraph return after every second sentence or so. How you lay out your text will make a big difference to its readability.
- Make use of lists with numbers or bullet points. Again, this makes information much more digestible and scannable. Using lists also forces you to not be unnecessarily wordy. Numbered lists are very good for step-by-step instructions while bullet points are ideal for setting out information points.
- Use bold and italics text formatting to stress the sections or words you want to emphasize. It makes text more skimmable and easier to grasp.
- Use anchor text to highlight your keywords and link out to other pages on your website that you would like your readers to visit. Remember that every web page is a step on your reader’s journey through your site.
- Include images, infographics and other visual contentsuch as videos to break up the text.
Ready to get started?
Both our Keyboost and SEO Page Optimizer tools are free and can be accessed by you now.
- We bring you 15 years of experience in the digital performance field that you can tap into.
- We offer a dual package of tools to enhance the two most crucial elements of your website's performance and online findability.
- Use them in your own time. Each tool can be implemented step by step
- SEO Page Optimizer and Keyboost are both free to use.
- With SEO Page Optimizer you can see immediate results in our on-page content performance.
- With Keyboost, you can see search engine increased results after 2 weeks with the maximum effect within four weeks.
Want to get in touch?
Do you have questions about our SEO tips, about SEO Page Optimizer or Keyboost? Then contact us. We look forward to being able to help you. You can also call us at +44 3308 084797 or e-mail: info@seopageoptimizer.co.uk
Keyboost is an in-house website tool for general use, designed to improve performance and rankings.