On-Page SEO part 2
Now you have your main SEO keyword and subs it’s time to get working. Four elements to gold on-page SEO:
- Page title – use your main keyword in the page title meta tag.
- Description – use the main keyword in the page description meta tag.
- First sentence – use the main keyword in the first sentence of the first paragraph.
- Domain title – try to have the keyword in the domain URL string.
Why do these things for SEO? Because that’s what shows up when you search on Google. You see the page title, description and first paragraph. Keywords will be highlighted in bold, making them, and you, stand out from the crowd.
You can also use h1 and h2 header links and set keywords to bold to spice things up for the search engines. It is alleged that they love this, but unproven.
Off-page SEO
Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. They give you what we search engine experts call link juice. The more popular and important the website that linked to yours is, the more juice that link gives you. More links are always better. Be careful of people selling links, they can get you blocked out if you use too many spammy back-links.
Anchor the backlinks. This means the text on the link. Make sure the link text is the main keyword you are targeting. don’t try to be different. Always use the main keyword of the page as the anchor text. No exceptions and for SEO don’t add extra words to the main keyword phrase you have until you are established in Google for the main keyword. Just use the exact keyword in your backlinks anchor text until you reach number 1-3.
More backlinks are always good. Get as many as possible from the best sources you can find. High PR websites are best for link juice.
Social media for SEO
Facebook and Twitter links, likes and tweets are important to a website. As with backlinks acquire these like acne. Tell your friends to like and tweet about your website, but don’t get overly pushy or they’ll defriend or unbefriend you and you can’t see their cat pics anymore. Sad face.
Links from social media sites like Reddit are good for getting search engine crawlers to visit your site. These index your page, which is a fancy word for look at. You want Google to look at your site often and you will see Googlebot in your website logs. This is good and means Larry or Sergey have visited your site to check it. It will appear in Google soon.
What is an SEO expert?
An SEO expert, also called an SEO guru or SEO ninja rockstar by him or her self, is a person who knows the techniques in this guide and how to action them. This actioning is the key point to SEO as it is dull, monotonous work at the best of times. Getting backlinks for SEO sounds easy but is boring and you need to know where the great places to get links from are. Discovering the best keywords to use for articles is time consuming and requires significant creativity.
Should I outsource SEO?
Outsourcing SEO becomes a project management task. Cheap Indian, Eastern European and now Chinese labor is waiting for just these SEO tasks on various freelance websites. British and American students will be glad to write cheap articles around dedicated keywords. Expect as low as $0.04 a word for reasonable quality. Don’t go too cheap on article writing services or you’ll end up with the dreaded machine generated content, which is a red flag for usability.
If you have a low Optimization budget, I recommend splitting your needs into manageable project components which you can then outsource individually as required. For example, find high traffic keywords yourself, write articles then outsource just the backlink creation.
Noob guide to SEO
If you have a high budget, outsource it all. Keyword generation, article writing, on-page SEO, off-page SEO and backlinking. Ideally you want to give the entire project to a reputable SEO company. One which engages purely in white hat techniques. Many companies offering marketing and PR services now have dedicated SEO departments that can help. Once again, be careful of them using black hat techniques and don’t be afraid to ask if concerned.
Outsourcing SEO services also means you don’t have to keep track of the latest SEO developments. Something which can be excessively time consuming and tedious. Many Search engine experts follower the user Matt Cutts on Twitter. Matt Cutts is a public face at Google.com, regularly updating Search engine marketers on the latest methods they can use to move up the rankings and best practices for web design.
SEO tips
And that’s the end of the NOOB guide to SEO. I hope you enjoyed it and leave a comment if you have any questions!
Hi! Do you know if they make any plugins to protect against hackers?
I’m kinda paranoid about losing everything I’ve worked hard on. Any tips?.
Search engine optimiers, anti hacking security tends to come from the server side and is a whole other topic from SEO. I recommend taking regular, well spaced backups so if anything does go wrong, you can quickly recover. Next question!.
What would be a way to track progress once you optimize SEO?.
Great question Chris, to track progress you need an analytics program. I recommend the free Google Analytics from google. There’s also other paid for analytics and web stats solutions that are worth searching for.
Thank you for your reply – this is a very helpful blog post. I hope that others find it helpful, though I am sure you have already SEO’d the page =).
Well it’s second if you search for noob guide to online marketing, which isn’t even the title!.
Are you able to track ranking progress after you optimize without manually searching through search page results?.
Great question Chris. At the end of the day, SEO is all about getting high up in the search engine rankings, hence, Googling your Targeted keyword is the best way to check. There are many tools to check back-links and other components of good SEO but it all comes down to organic search position.
Due to new developments in Googles ranking algorithms it’s a good idea to log out of all Google services and wipe cookies before doing the search to check your ranking. This gives you a good idea of what a fresh google user searching the keyword for the first time would see.
Happy SEOing and once again, glad to see you like the Noob guide to SEO.
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