Have you ever wondered “how do I rank higher so more people are likely to click on my website and not a competitors?”
The answer: SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION
SEO stands for search engine optimisation. To put it in simple terms, its where you rank on search engines such as Google. There are other search engines, but Google has the lions share of the search engine market, so we will focus on Google today. Increasing your organic ranking on Google can be a challenge, as Google is an ever changing beast with new rules and algorithms being added all the time. The best way to start is to explain how Google works in the first place.
Google Search’s entire aim is to provide the best quality and most relevant content to its users (otherwise people would just go elsewhere to Yahoo or Bing!). Google looks at a number of different metrics to determine which website is going to provide the best user experience and we are going to break this down in this article.
In order to find out which pages are the best ones to show, the Google algorithm will crawl every single page on the internet (literally trillions of pages) and gather information. I like to think of these crawlers as little digital spiders that travel around the world wide web (gross, right!).
There are 2 types of SEO; on-page and off-page. The first one we will go through is your on-page SEO, then we will look at your off-page SEO. Using a car as an analogy, on page SEO (things that are on your own website) is like the wheels, chassis, steering wheel, etc, all the things that the car needs to function. Off page SEO is the engine. You can have a huge powerful engine but without the wheels, you aren’t going to go anywhere. Likewise, if you have the best quality wheels, fuel, etc and a tiny tiny engine, you won’t get very far either.
We hope this is making sense. If you have any questions, book your FREE consult here
The Heading 1 tag, or H1 tag is another HTML code that tells google what your webpage/article is about. An example of this could be the headline on a news article or blog.
Your URL is the full page address. Using Keywords in your URL in the correct way will help google understand what your webpage is about.
The Title tag is a HTML code that allows you to give the web page a title. This is essential in the role it plays on your organic search ranking.
This is an element that provides a brief summary of a web page on the search engine search page.
The user interface is a word to describe how your website functions for the user. If your website is confusing, the links don’t work, or people cant easily find the information they are looking for, this could result in a poor user experience.
These are words that describe to Google what your images are of. For example, if I featured a photo of a Blue hat on my website, used Alt Tags “Blue Hat”, When someone googles blue hats then google knows my website has Blue hats.
I’m sure you have all seen web pages in the past that have ERROR 404 on them. This basically means that the particular page used to be live, now it isn’t. This happens when you take pages down or change the URL in the wrong way.
An internal link is a link on one page, that leads directly to another page on the same website. this can be in the form of buttons, icons or even hyperlinks
Those Google crawlers go on every page and gather their information to work out whether or not your information is going to be something that Google want to be listing on their index. This can take time.
It’s really not likely that you will see high search rankings within the first few months of having your new website as Google is still trying to understand what you’re all about!
Google measures if people are going to your website and clicking that back button quickly or not.
It does this because if lots of people are bouncing off a website, it means that it isn’t relevant to what they were looking for (this is a big no-no in Googles eyes as it leads to a poor user experience).
Dwell time is an important indicator to Google as to whether your website is providing viewers with the information they are looking for. If viewers are spending 30 seconds on a page, Google will see it as less relevant in comparison to a page where people spend 5 minutes on average.
Ways to improve this is to have attractive photos and icons, engaging and relevent content and text, and a welcoming feel to your website.
Google doesn’t want slow websites on the first page. Google have been measuring this since 2010. If a website is taking ages to load then again it would lead to a poor user experience.
You can test your own page here www.gtmetrix.com. Google recommend it to be under 3 seconds.
Having out dated or old content can make Google think that your website is no longer relevant to your topic. You need to keep things fresh and updated.
Google use different ways of determining the authority and relevancy of your website in many different ways, but one great way that Google can determine this is whether or not other websites are talking about, referring to and linking to your website.
Imagine if the official NDIS government website had an article that referenced your business specifically, that would give you a whole lot of credibility, don’t you think! It certainly would in the eyes of Google as it would recognise a very strong direct relationship between what you do and the NDIS.
There are lots of different ways that you can get other websites to link to your website (giving it credibility) and here are a few:
A negative SEO campaign is when someone purposely goes out and does things to harm how a website can be seen in the eyes of Google.
The most common form of this is competitor attacks where competitor companies will go things to lower your ranking (and therefore increase theirs).
Google wants to know what your website is about, and having too many topics can confuse it too. If your a website that loves talking about nutrition and then you start creating content about skateboarding, then Google is likely to get confused.
Instead, make a link between topics. For example, why diet and nutrition is important to professional skateboarders.
Confusing Google using conflicting key words. 2 pages on your website competing over the same keyword.
Having the same content as someone else is obviously a big no-no. Even if you are the first to post it and the original creator of the content, having it in multiple places on the internet can confuse Google and make it harder to rank higher.
Use www.siteliner.com (free version) to check this.
Anchor Text is using particular keywords that tell viewers what they might see if they follow a particular link. Some examples of this are: exact match, partial match, branded link, URL anchor and misc (“read more”, “click here”, etc). Click here for an example.
You cant just use one form of link when getting others to talk about your business. its important to get lots of types of links.
Do Follow links are links that actually lead somewhere. No Follow links lead no where. Some sites don’t allow Do Follow links so this is something you need to be aware of as No Follow links are worthless in the eyes of Google.
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