CDG Marketing & Web Design

Search Engines

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics

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Whether your are blogging or developing another type of website, the basics to SEO remain the same:

On-page SEO includes:

  • Good, fresh content
  • Optimized content
    • Meta <Title> Tag containing keyword
    • Meta <Description> Tag containing keyword
    • A reasonable density of the keyword you are targeting in your content
    • Proximity of keyword to beginning of content
    • Keyword appearing in H tags and alt tags (there is dispute over this in the SEO world)
  • Schema markup

google search display with markup SEO

Off-page SEO includes:

  • Quality links back to your site:
    • Organic links
    • Directory links
    • Authority site links
  • Social Signals
  • Integration of products offered by the search engines (Google, Bing, etc.)

The trick, of course, is doing all that optimization to make the search engines happy, and still having a site that looks and reads well to your human audience. If your visitors don’t become leads or customers all the SEO in the world is useless.

SEO is a top that changes constantly, mostly due to updates in the algorithms used by Google (primarily) and other search engines.

This barely scratches the surface of SEO. Entire courses are available on this topic because, contrary to rumors: SEO is here to stay.

Quality Links = Better Rankings

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links-graphicLink building must be part of your search engine optimization (SEO) plan. Where content is king on the internet, links are queen. Links back to your site are how the search engines tell whether your content is valuable or not.

Quality Counts

While there are many products available on the internet that claim to get you a substantial number of links back to your site, the quality, or lack thereof, may actually be detrimental to your rankings. If your business is a pet store and your links are on a site about vacations in the Bahamas, the search engines consider this a “junk” link and you may actually be penalized in the rankings game.

Some of the software out there that targets other sites for linking is actually quite sophisticated and will only give you results based on specific keywords.

You want to focus on links on sites that have complementary subjects. If you specialize in accessible real estate for handicapped people, a link on a site with other resources for handicapped people is a quality link. If that site has a good page rank on the search engines, then your link is even more valuable.

Anchor Text

The anchor text is the actual words on the page that you click on. The anchor text of a link is extremely important, because it’s that text that tells the search engine what your site is about.

For example:

For great information about home staging in Norfolk, click here

Check out this valuable information about home staging in Norfolk.

In these two examples the first one appears to be a link about “click here”, not good at all! The second example is a link about specific keywords. The links should be variations of the keywords you are trying to rank for.

Ideally, the links should also be to various pages on your website and not necessarily the home page. A link to the home page is a link to your site, but a link to a sub-page is a link to your CONTENT.

Conclusion

Focus on getting backlinks to your site with consideration to the source of the link, the content of the link, and the destination of the link.

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