Getting to Grips with Google Part IV – Link Building & Promotion

If OnPage SEO is all about getting Google to understand the contents of your web pages, then OffPage SEO, link building, is all about giving Google a good reason to put your website high up in the search results.

The success of Google in the Search Engine arena is down to its highly accurate search results.

These are due to its primary ranking system – PageRank. Now, while there is much debate as to how important PageRank actually is these days, there’s no escaping that it’s still one of the major factors in generating Google’s SERPs.

The idea of PageRank is a simple and thoroughly democratic one. The theory goes that in a network of interlinked documents, such as the World Wide Web, the pages with the most inbound links to them are going to be the most important, and most authoritative pages.

In simple terms a link from another web page to yours is considered a vote, a vote approving your content and recommending it to others. It is this “voting” system that is the key to Google’s results generation.

Getting to Grips with Google Part III continued – OnPage SEO

Previously we looked at the basics of keyword positioning as a means of helping Google understand the content of your webpage. Continuing on from that let’s look at applying these techniques to our entire website.

Going back to our Rattan Furniture shop example, we’ve already optimised our home page, so what can we do to optimize our inner pages? The OnPage SEO techniques we covered last time still apply and should be used on every page on the website. But, do we want our inner pages to be targeting the same keywords in the same manner?

In a word, the answer is no. There’s no point for us to target the same keywords. Each page of our site is going to have specific and hopefully unique content which we will be optimizing in exactly the same manner as we did last time.

This time, however, there is a little more that we can do. We can build more SEO factors into our sub pages through navigation, file structure and file naming.

Getting to Grips with Google Part III – OnPage SEO

In the previous installment we looked at finding the best keywords for us to target with our website. Now that we have our list compiled we need to start working on our page, with the goal of helping Google really understand the contents of the page.

Once Google understands completely what your pages are about, it can then start coupling this with your backlinks to decide where to put you in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

So how do we do this? When search engines were in their infancy, SE’s tried to understand the contents of pages by calculating things such as keyword density.

Techniques such as keyword stuffing could then be used to fill the page with the desired keywords and thereby raising the density for that term, and in turn ranking better for it.

Nowadays SEs, and in particular Google, are a lot smarter. They no longer look at your keyword density, and instead use other markers to understand a page.

These markers are semantic markers already built into HTML. HTML was originally conceived with the idea that the way a page was constructed would format the information, tag it, in a way that made it understandable.

Getting to Grips with Google – Part II – Keyword Analysis

Choosing the right keywords and key phrases is one of the most important steps of any SEO and website promotion strategy.

It’s all well and good ranking number 1 for phrases such as “new and used vintage wine racks” but if no one is searching for that term, then your efforts will be fruitless.

By doing a keyword analysis, we can look at what keywords & keyphrases are being searched for the most, and also then we can check to see what the competition is like for those terms, and if we think we can stand a chance for ranking well for them.

First off, let’s suppose your online business is one that sells rattan garden furniture. Obviously we’ll be optimizing for the term “rattan furniture,” but should this be our only target? Let’s have a look.

Head on over to the Google Keyword Tool and let’s type “rattan furniture” into the box. Give it a few seconds and a long list of search terms will appear in order of relevance.

Getting to Grips with Google

Editor: First off, sorry for the absence. Been real busy. But have not forgotten you readers.

Anyway… Guys, meet Ed Gray. Our new guest blogger. I’m very glad to have him onboard. And I present to you his first article in a article series on SEO. Ed…take it away. Enjoy the article folks.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has long been a buzzword in the internet marketing industry. And in spite of that attention, it’s an often misunderstood practice.

Trawl the web for SEO techniques and you’ll be bamboozled by a myriad of conflicting opinions and contradictory advice.

In this series, I’m going to ignore all the waffle and give you a guide on how you can increase your traffic with some practical tips on how to get search results from Google.

I won’t even bother claiming to get you to the top position. Such claims are always nonsense and should be regarded with heavy skepticism.

The aim of this guide is to simply set you off in the right direction, increase your traffic and ultimately increase your revenues. Over the coming weeks we will be going through the following steps: