If you are looking to make an investment in SEO it’s important that you familiarise yourself with the building blocks that make up the overall SEO mix. By doing this, you’re able to actively understand how you can help your own site by putting together some great content!
We pulled the video into words, and here it is:
For this episode, I figured why not just explain SEO in about five minutes? See if we can get it wrapped up in a nutshell. I understand that a lot of people don’t actually know what SEO is or what it means, so I hope within this relatively short video I can explain, at least briefly, what it is and what you can do right now to help your own website.
Roughly speaking, SEO – search engine optimisation – is split into two parts: on-page and off-page.
On-page
Things that are going to be happening on your website.
Off-page
Things that are going to be happening off your website.
It starts with great content. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to have reams and reams of text packed full with keywords to do well on the search engines. In fact, Google doesn’t like that very much. It provides an unnatural experience for the users, and generally it is uninteresting for everybody concerned, and that includes search engine spiders.
That can include good, strong, readable pages. There is a bit of keyword density stuff in there, of course, because that’s one of the ways that Google reads the pages and learns about what that page is actually talking about. So it is important to get your keywords in there, but just don’t go over the top.
There’s no need to be too unnatural about it. If you’re going to be explaining your services to a client, then the way that you explain it to a client is probably going to be the way that you should explain it on your website.
Blog as well. Blog is great for improving the density of content on your website – the volume of content on your site, and it means you can include lots more keywords, and just generally improve the amount of output from your website. We’d always recommend having a blog on your site.
Strong, readable pages with good keyword density.
Metatitle tag: arguably the most important point of a page. To explain briefly what that means, if you’re on Google search and you type in any search term, the bit in blue which you clock, that is actually the meta title tag.
Again, it involves a little bit of HTML coding there to know how to change that, but when you can, it’s a great tool and it’s the best in your arsenal. If you don’t know how to do that, probably just learn a bit and find out.
Headings: H1, H2, H3, those are HTML tags and those describe to Google, and to the user, what order these headings should be placed in. So H1 is the most important heading on my page.
Page load speed, aesthetics and visitor data: this is brand new stuff. In order to fight back at poor-quality sites, Google is employing lots of tactics like looking at how many people click a website and then return straight back to search. So it’s important to make your website look good, and just improve the page load speeds. If a page is really slow, then the chances are it’s not going to be a good experience for a user and Google will degrade it a little bit.
Google are employing lots of machine-learning techniques to work out whether a page looks good, which is brand new stuff, so it is important to have a good looking website – both for human visitors and search engine spiders, as well.
Then we go onto off-page: off-page makes up about 70% of your overall “look” as far as SEO goes. That includes inbound links, brand signals and social signals. Google’s putting a lot of emphasis these days on brand – whether you’re a brand. If you’re a brand, it likes it.
Social signals: again, it’s one of the things that you can’t fake. If you’ve tried to learn a little bit about SEO or tried to do a bit of SEO on your website, you’ll have probably seen hundreds of people offering thousands of links – “I’ll submit you to a thousand web directories and it’s going to cost you $50.” Social signals aren’t so easy to fake.
You try and buy 50,000 links from Facebook profiles, it’s not going to happen. It’s too difficultt to fake, and it’s not as easy for them to get into. Whereas with of the tools that they have, they’re able to submit thousands at a time to smaller web directories or directories, often, that they have themselves set up. It’s all a bit of a grey area.
We’d always recommend that if you are going to be using business directories, make sure they’re relevant. If you’re a local business, then why not be in a local directory? If you’re based inManchester, then why not be in “Businesses inManchester” directory, or whatever it is? If you’re a haulage company, for example, why not be in a haulage or transport directory?
These are all great links because they’re relevant, and often, you can get them for free. It’s free to be on business directories, and business directories that are paid for tend to be a little bit shady. There are some exceptions in there – things like Yahoo directory, which is great because Google loves that, Dmoz which is a great directory that’s free, it’s that kind of thing.
Looking at your link profile, as well: Google looks at that. It looks to see how many links are keyword-rich links – links that are pointing from other websites to yours with your keyword in there. If you’ve got too many of those, then the chances are you’re doing SEO, and although they know about SEO, they don’t like it, because at the end of the day, you’re trying to manipulate their rankings.
If you’ve got thousands and thousands of links with one keyword in the anchor text – that’s the bit that you would click if you were on that page – if you’ve got thousands of those with just that keyword in, then the chances are you’re trying to game the search engines for that particular phrase. So it looks at the mix between the keywords that you’re for your anchor texts coming in.
That’s an important point: anchor text in external links – inbound links coming into your website from other websites. If you have strong anchor texts in there – if you are a haulage company and you’re doing freight transport to Ipswich, then if you’ve got lots of links that are coming in that are saying “freight transport to Ipswich” then Google is going to say “All of these websites are saying ‘I vote for this website’ – a link being a vote or thumbs up – I vote for this website for this phrase.’” If your phrase is “plasma televisions”, then if you’ve got lots of links for “plasma televisions”, then the chances are you do plasma televisions.
Relevance and trust and bad neighbourhoods: if you’ve got links from what they call “comment spam” – some blog posts have got quite strong pages, and some blog posts allow people to comment on those blogs without so much moderation. You end up with hundreds and hundreds of link, just because the author, the person that has submitted that comment, is allowed to have a link within their name, and the name is often the anchor text pointing back.
It looks at bad neighbourhood, relevance and trust. If you’ve got a plasma television site, why would you have a link a business directory inHong Kong? It doesn’t make sense.
Trust, as well: if the site that’s linking to you isn’t trusted, then a link is either going to be disregarded or it’s going to harm you.
That’s about it. I don’t know whether I’ve run over five minutes slightly, or whether I’m under – I’ve not really got a stopwatch, which I probably should have – but I hope, at least, it gives you an understanding, briefly, of the two different factors. Each one of these is a video in its own right, and a page of content in its own right, for you to understand. However, this is a brief overview, and I hope it helps.
Liam
