What is SEO?
What is SEO? Everyone talks about it nowadays. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and sounds scary and complicated. But it only sounds like that. In simple words we can describe SEO as a range of techniques which can help to make your business visible to the potential customers when they perform an online search.
Main Search Engines are:
- Bing
- Yahoo
What does SEO consist of?
There are two types of SEO – onsite and offsite. To make your onsite SEO rocking you need to organize the content up to the certain standards. And that is what you definitely can and must do as soon as possible.
See further explanation of each ONSITE SEO attribute with a real-life example and application to one of our client’s website:
Keywords
First of all, you need to define a certain key phrase. Key phrase is what the user will type in a search bar. If you are using the CMS system (WordPress, WIX or other), there will be a plugin which helps you to easily edit your keywords. If you are not using any CMS systems – use tag <meta> to define a key phrase in the <head> of your page. Also you will need to add the key phrase of the meta description of your page. Or simply contact your webmaster and ask him about it.
USE ONLY 1 KEYPHRASE PER PAGE AND NEVER REPEAT IT. Otherwise you will be stealing from yourself. If you are repeating the keywords – your webpages will be competing with each other.
SEO Title
This title appears on the search results page and it must convince the person to click on it. It needs to be of a certain length. For example, for Google you have only 60 characters to fit your phrase. Make sure you use it right. Do not forget to include your key phrase in the SEO Title. It can be easily done in the CMS. If you don’t know how to do that, just call your webmaster or contact us.
H1 Title
Make sure your page has only one H1 title and it contains your key phrase. It will serve 2 purposes. First of all, it will make the topic clear to the users and encourage them to spend more time on your website. Secondly, it will tell Google that your content is relevant to the key phrase which will help get a better ranking on the search results page.
Links
It is very important to have inbound and outbound links. Make sure your pages are not the dead end. Give a user an option to have a look at your other pages (blog, contacts, etc). And also put some external links if it is relevant to you content (for example to Wikipedia for definitions). It will make the Search Engine love you more and give you better ranking.
Images
Make sure you are using enough images for the length of your text. And it is also important to set alternative attributes (alt attributes) for your images. Those attributes will appear on a page if a user cannot see the picture. We all care about people with special needs and so do the Search Engines.
Offsite SEO
Off-page SEO is an action taken outside of your website to make an improvement in Search Engine rankings. It means that in order to get good rankings the other resources need to have links to your website. You can post your website’s links onto Facebook groups, on different Forums, on websites like TradeMe, Wikipedia, NZherald and etc., – websites, that have good reputation and high rank. Ask websites to write a post about you, or repost your blog posts. Pay for advertising of your website to sites like Stuff or any other online magazines and blogs, forums, industry websites.
