What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Quite a few people have talked about search engine optimization (SEO) but not many will understand it or what it does and why it is so important. Basically, search engine optimization (SEO) is a popular technique mainly used in web design to optimize SERP (search engine results page) websites to increase traffic. As you can imagine, improving your website’s position on the major search engines can have a huge impact on your business or website. If your business or website is at the top of a major search engine like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, then when people search for something, they are likely to click on your website. It is said that at least 50% of people who search for something always click on the top result because it is at the top and is seen as the best. So how can people be on the search engine and with people searching for so many different things, what do you have to be on top for?
How do you decide the right search term?
The most important thing before trying to get to the top of a search engine is the search term you want to be on top for. If you are a web design company, trying to get to the top of the search engine for the search term sports or cars would be silly. I know this is a little obvious when you consider that sports are searched 4,090,000 times per month, cars are searched 1,220,000 per month and web design is searched 301,000 times per month. It may be searched for more often than web design but it is not relevant and will mislead people searching for the search term sports or cars and odds that they will not want web design and never come back to your website again. So, if you were a web design company, would web design be the best search term to target? Yes and no. Yes because this is the highest search term for web design but no because there is a lot of competition. If a web design company is at the top of the search engine for web design, it will get a lot of clients and I’m sure they know a lot about search engine optimization as well as being on the scene for a long time. When you search web design, close to 500,000,000 results come up. The odds that you will even get on the first page of a web design search engine are very unlikely, so we need to narrow down your main search term.
How do you narrow your search to benefit you?
When narrowing down a search term, there are a lot of things to think about. Do you want to target a specific area? Do you want to attract clients with a limited budget or unlimited money to spend? To narrow your search, plan what you want to get out of it and focus on a specific audience. If you are a web design company based in Nottingham and you want to be the best in this field then web design in Nottingham would be a perfect keyword. The reason for this is that people who are looking for web design in the Nottingham area are more likely to design websites in Nottingham. Although web design in Nottingham looks better, only 73 people search for this per month as Nottingham like web design is searched 2,400 times per month. 2400 is a big drop from 301,000 but the competition has dropped from 500,000,000 to 534,000. Competition ratio for web design 1: 1661 searches per result Nottingham as web design has a competition ratio of 1: 225 searches per result. Not only is the competition a lot better, but people who search for this often want to get a web design service rather than study or learn about it. There are many ways to narrow your search, for example, you’re selling cars because we know a huge search term, but if you’re only selling a specific used car like Ford Focus Second Hand, making Ford Focus Second Hand means your primary search term targeting 1,900 people per month They are looking for this product.
Decided on the search term yet how to get to the top?
This is very likely the hardest part of search engine optimization and also the most time consuming. You have decided what search term or search terms you need now to get to the top search engine for that term. There are hundreds of factors to consider when doing search engine optimization but I will only cover the basics, if you want to get proper results I would recommend going to a professional SEO or web design company that does search engine optimization. I will only touch on 5 important factors that anyone can do.
The first factor – new content
Search engines love fresh, original, and fresh content. Don’t repeat other people’s work or try to copy what they did, come up with your own ideas and write your own content and you will go a long way. Remember to include your search terms (known as keywords and this will be explained more in the next factor) so that the search engine can recognize your content and then decide to pull it off when someone searches for it. It is better to spend hours on one page than to spend 5 minutes copying and pasting someone else’s hard work. Duplicate content is where you copy someone’s content and mark them as your own. Search engines index all the pages they come across on the Internet, and if they find that you have copied someone’s content, your website will be flagged, and they will have a hard time getting to the first page. If you update your content regularly, the search engine will detect it and will only work for you (as long as it is relevant) and will improve your position.
The second factor – keyword density
Keyword density is another important factor for getting a high search engine ranking. Keyword is a search term so to keep the same topic as before, the search term I was talking about was Nottingham web design, so Nottingham web design would be my keyword. Keyword density is the percentage of impressions your keywords have compared to others. Adding all the displayed words (and the metadata factor of 3) and finding the percentage of your keywords can be a time-consuming and nearly impossible process. However there are many tools that will do this for you, and most of them are free, so a quick navigation online should help you find the tools you need.
There is no set density your keyword must appear to a search engine to capture but there are guidelines. Some people think 2-4% is the right amount while others think 4-6% is best. This is all a matter of opinion and all that matters is that your keywords stand out to both search engines and readers. Don’t bother your content with keywords because the search engine will flag you because of that and if you reach the top of the search engine people won’t be able to understand it but don’t be funny in putting it down you can’t be careful otherwise the search engine may not pick up what you want for the search term your. I always like to make sure I only mention my keyword at first because of my personal beliefs about what a search engine algorithm is but the more content you write and the more skilled you are at SEO, you’ll also have your opinions on what works better than others.
Factor 3 – Metadata
Things start to get a little more complicated, no but anyone who has gotten to this point in the article is more than able to understand it. Metadata is the title, description, and keywords that the reader will not see but the search engine will see. Some web design software comes with plugins to make it easier to enter metadata but if that’s not the case and you are experienced with HTML, you can still enter this yourself. The meta title is basically the address of the web page you are writing. This should be no more than 60 characters and should not make sense. For example, the home page of the meta title for web design companies might read “Web Design Nottingham – Web Design | Web Designers” or something along those lines. They are not fully understood or a sentence but the search engine will see it and understand that it is words of interest and what is the content.
After the Meta Title, there is the Meta Description which is longer and should be more understandable to the readers because some search engines display this when the result returns to the searcher. It must be no more than 160 words and must include your keywords again. It might read “We are the #1 web design company in Nottingham. We offer the best web design around and……” and so on. The last piece of metadata is Meta Keywords. This is where you have to put all the keywords that you want to be indexed by a search engine and it should read like a comma-separating list of all the keywords. Again for a web design company, it might sound like “web design, web designers, web design nottingham….” etc. There is no limit to how many you can add but I don’t recommend spamming by adding excessive keywords and only entering each keyword once.
Factor 4 – Backlinks
A backlink is an internal link from one web page to another on your domain. The reason for this is when the search engine lands on one of your web pages, it scans and indexes that web page. Another web page on your domain cannot be scanned and indexed if there is no link from that page. For example (all links use a semicolon and not a full comma to prevent the actual link) “http; // www.madeupwebsite.co.uk/page1” has a link to “http; // www.madeupwebsite.co.uk/page2” so The search engine can scan and index the “http; // www.madeupwebsite.co.uk/page1” link notice. Then the link will follow “http; // www.madeupwebsite.co.uk/page2” and index that as well. This is important because if only one of your web pages is indexed, the rest of your pages won’t show up when someone searches and you’ll rely on people finding your website and browsing through all of your pages to get noticed. Another thing to think about as well is how are you going to link from page to page? All this can be done with sitemap but you can get some links on the page which will improve your SERP by linking keywords to pages that are optimized for that keyword. Let’s say a web page is optimized for web design, the density of keywords and metadata includes web design, why not link web design to word one to page web design?
Factor 5 – Anchor text and external link
Anchor text are the words associated with a link. It seems a bit confusing but instead of reading the aa link “feel free to click this link for web design” http; // www.madeupwebsite.co.uk “You can always put the link so it will be read”, feel free to click on this web design link “links the word web design to” http; // www.madeupwebsite.co.uk “.again with web design software and plugins this becomes easy but if it’s HTML you will use”
The reason for doing this is that you are telling a search engine about the link. If the anchor text is the web design and the content on the web page you link to is web design optimized, the search engine will rank you higher and index it for the search term web design. This doesn’t get you to the top of the search engine right away and not one link will but to show you the strength of the links, just search click here. If you search, click here, it will take you to the Adobe Reader download page. The reason for this is that a lot of people associate the word click here with this webpage because it is a useful tool that people might need to view certain things.
It doesn’t stop there
When it comes to search engine optimization, there are hundreds of other ranking factors that I haven’t mentioned. You can go ahead and study more SEO techniques, but it can take years to understand, and since the internet is constantly growing and expanding, I suggest you leave SEO to the experts as if you don’t fully understand search engine optimization, it may make things worse for the website your. However, if you want to study it more in-depth, there are a lot of websites and a lot of articles and other resources that you can read but SEO techniques are not written in stone and others will have different opinions.
The best way to learn SEO techniques is to test them and see what works for you, but it can be a long and time consuming process. Never go with a company that promises to rank 1 page on all search engines within days because that is not possible. If a company claims this, it is most likely about an ad keyword campaign that is completely different from organic search engine optimization and does not provide the same results in addition to being expensive.
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