What is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of ensuring that your web pages appear in the search results when people type in specific phrases. For example, if you have an Ipswich business in the web design industry, you’d probably like it to show up in Google when someone types the phrase Web Design Ipswich. This article will briefly describe how to rank for the keywords you want your business to show on Google or other Search Engines. SEO is essential to all types of online websites, whether they are corporate, personal, news, e-commerce, or review sites. If your site is ranked highly in the search engine, it will be viewed as it has a higher authority over similar sites. SEO uses keywords to rank a website. Your keywords will define the subject and content of your site, and when the search engine bots scan your page texts, it picks up these keywords and matches them with the phrase being typed into the engine. Carefully choose your site keywords as they are the main ingredients of optimizing a site. This can be done using many ways, such as using the Google keyword tool and other paid tools such as Word Tracker and market samurai.

What are Backlinks?

Backlinks are a vital component in search engine optimization. They are the HTML to your website from another website. Backlinks are known as inbound links, incoming links, backlinks, in links, and inward links, and are incoming links to your website or web page. There are methods of picking backlinks that will improve your ranking in the search engine: Ignore most directories: You can pay a lot of membership fees, but they may not be of any help. You aren’t assured of being listed. Commenting on blogs or forums: If you put your URL in your digital signature and make intelligent comments, then you will get a backlink to your website in return. Writing articles: There are a lot of article directories. Write unique and rich content and post them on article directories.

What is Anchor Text?

Getting links from other blogs and websites isn’t enough for your site to be ranked well in search results. The quality of your anchor text plays the main role. Anchor text is the visible text in a hyperlink. In most browsers, anchor text is normally blue and underlined. Many website owners know the importance of SEO and backlinks, but fail to understand anchor text is the most important factor in search engine optimization. Anchor text tells the search engine about the web page. When properly used, it can boost your search engine rankings and support link building. Many site owners don’t know how to use anchor text and end up using phrases and words such as “read more” or “click here.” When you start linking your website and using keywords as your anchor text, your site will rise in the search engine rankings. If many links are pointing to a page with relevant keywords in its anchor text, then that page will rank in search engines hence attracting traffic.

Difference between onsite SEO and offsite SEO?

SEO is broken down into two, onsite and offsite SEO. Onsite aspects make your site more spider-friendly, and offsite aspects help in keyword text back linking.

Onsite SEO

This is anything that can be done to your website to make it more relevant to the keywords that you have picked to optimize your site. Strategies for onsite SEO include:

• Meta Tags
• Keyword Density
• Title Tags
• Use of Keywords in Alt Tags

This means onsite SEO deals with how you use keyword phrases on your website and ensures that your site is relevant to the keyword you are trying to target.

Offsite SEO

Offsite SEO deals with the internet as a whole. It mostly deals with link building and other strategies. The following are a few common offsite link building things you can do:

• Vary anchor text in links
• Link locations (blogs, directories, articles, other websites, etc.)
• Different link types (two-way, one-way)
• Social links (Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Reddit, etc.)

How to rank higher in Google?

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We all want our pages to be ranked #1 on Google. For you to be ranked higher on Google, you need to put great content on your website designed in a way it attracts visitors and pleases them enough that they will return to your site. The following are things you can do to rank your site higher on Google:

Title Tags: Optimizing your title tag is the simplest way to improve your Google ranking. If you are trying to rank a site about XXXX Gym, you can use a title tag like “XXXX Gym- Safety and Maintenance.” You need to figure out what your potential customers/ readers will be searching for on the search engine.

Site content: Even if your site title tags are optimized, your site content should match what your audience is searching for. For example, if you are selling about XXXX Gym, your content must have the phrase “XXXX Gym” spread naturally. It’s important to put your keywords in your header tags.

Inner linking: Try to link all pages on your website to within your site. For example, if you have a page about XXXX Gym Safety, ensure you have a sentence on those pages about XXXX Gym maintenance and link your visitors to that page.

Anchor-text optimized backlinks: If you don’t have high-quality backlinks, you can find backlinks from article directories, and also from forums with your site in your signature. Patience. Ranking a site isn’t something that can happen overnight. SEO is a marathon, not a split. You will need persistence, and with the right SEO tools, SEO strategies, and SEO training, your site too can be one of those at the top.

What are Google Penalties?

This is a negative impact on your site rankings. The penalties can either be due to manual Google reviews or updates to the Google algorithms. You can use Google webmaster tools to check if your site has penalties. The tools are free and are the best to use to monitor and optimize your website. You can also use Google analytics to check if your site has penalties. It’s also free and will help check the health of your site. Sign in to your Google Analytics account and check the date and time you lost a lot of your web traffic. Check if the Google update was launched on the same date. If that’s the case, your website was affected by the Google updates, and you need to take some measures to restore your site rankings.

Different penalties and their effects

Google Panda: This is the type of penalty that targets sites with poor quality content. If your website gets a Panda penalty, you will experience a sharp but gradual decline in your site traffic.

Google Penguin: Penguin penalties targets site with unnatural links. If a website gets a Penguin penalty, the keyword or group of keywords will significantly drop in the rankings.