Lollipop Local

You’ll hear about Search Engine Optimisation from every online marketer and his wife but the truth is that, if you want your website to succeed, you will need to establish an effective SEO Strategy before you even think about building a website.

Why do I need an SEO strategy?

Search Engine Optimization is the process of getting websites ranking at the top of search engines such as Google. Achieving this will get more traffic directed to your website, which, in turn, could equate to more leads turning into paying customers.

If you are looking to position your business in the local market, then it is crucial to take advice from specialists in Local SEO Services, who can help you to apply geo-modifiers to the SEO strategy below. The same can apply if you are doing SEO for mobile marketing. These are both areas that will become more and more important for lead generation over the coming years.

Whether we are talking about large or small business SEO strategy, there are two different types: ON-Page SEO and OFF-Page SEO.

OFF-Page SEO is the main method for most effective results, but ON-Page is becoming increasingly valuable and should be put in place before moving on to the external optimisation.

ON-Page SEO strategy

An On-Page SEO strategy covers everything which is directly in your control on your webpage; these are things that are required to be done to optimize the each page of your website to get the higher rankings in search engines. On-Page SEO is not the complete solution and is not enough in most cases to get you to the top of Google – unless it is a very simple keyword which has virtually no competition in the rankings and this normally equates to little or no search volume. Ideally, to be awarded the highest rankings in the search engines,you need to use both On-Page and Off-Page SEO strategies.

So, the fundamental element in this process is identifying the best keywords to underpin your SEO strategy. Long tail phrases which have good search volume but lesser competition. And these must be built into the infrastructure of your website right from the start. They need to be part of the metadata for the individual pages and included in the slugs for each page’s URL.

Regular Content is a major priority; you will have to update your website as frequently as possible by adding new content and original content. Google for example, catches pages which have high activity on them, new posts, new feeds etc. Any articles and content on your website must be original content, do NOT copy and paste from other sites because Google does not like duplication. Google also likes to see content related to the other pages on your site, so not only does the subject matter need to be relevant, original and frequently changing, it needs to be targeted around your chosen keywords with articles that are of a good size, not just a group of small articles.

Headings! The Keyword or Keyphrase for which the user is trying to rank their webpage should be included in the h1 and h2 header tags. Just as you would break up any large block of text for a human reader, you can do this for the search engine spiders who are crawling your site. Most word processing software will have functinos for headings which will be tagged as H1 and H2. Simply highlight the desired text for the heading and then select whether it is the larger h1 heading, or h2 which is slightly smaller. If thinking of making a BLOG to begin to use SEO strategies on; I would recommend WordPress as it is easy to use and has some helpful tools which can help you easily fill out metatags for your webpage, the title, description and the desired keywords for the webpage(s).

Another important aspect of your on-page seo strategy is KeyWord Density. This is how often you will mention your given keyword throughout the content/article on your webpage, so if your keyword is something like ‘Gaming Headsets’ then mention that phrase every so often, spaced out depending upon the size of the article. You should aim to have a keyword density of between 1% and 3%. It is also a good idea to throw in some phrases that are similar to the main keyword or to use some other colloquialism that means the same thing.

It is also a good idea to embed a video relating to your keyword somewhere in your site, preferably from YouTube since Google owns it, but there are other platforms such as Vimeo and Metacafe.

Outbound Links are useful to have on your page. Although these can be in the sidebar, contextual links that are part of the main content are best. These should use the keyword as the anchor text and go out to authority sites talking about that subject.

Internal Links are being seen as having more and more value and you should ensure that each page of your website links out to other internal pages that can provide the user with a better experience and other reference points. Again, using keywords as anchor texts is good practice for an effective SEO strategy.

All this on-page SEO will help to tell the search engines what your site is about. Then it requires some human proof to confirm that the content you are offering as most relevant to its search terms is in fact good quality.

OFF-Page SEO strategy

Your OFF-Page SEO strategy should be about human interaction in the form of backlinking; getting links from other websites directing to your website. Search engines see these backlinks as a sort of vote for your website, so the more votes (backlinks) the higher rankings.

Contextual Backlinks – As mentioned earlier, these are backlinks which can be found throughout the content of a webpage, because if someone is reading an article on a webpage and suddenly comes across a link back to another website, they have high visibility – search engines know this! The more of these type of backlinks, the better help for your ranking. Again, having a relevant keyword in the anchor text will do you a lot of good in the eyes of the search engines. It tells them that the linking website is approving of your page’s content on that keyword.

Variety is KEY! You will need lots of different types of backlinks from different websites, which means you can’t just get hundreds from one webpage and think that your website will then dominate the rankings. It doesn’t work like that because Google wants things to look natural. Get backlinks from other blogs, related websites and forums. Comment on other people’s posts or videos. Use social bookmarks to favourite your site’s content so that it can be exposed to other interested parties. Ideally all these other websites should be hosted on different IP addresses as it all goes to help show Google that there is a buzz about the content on your website.

Having said all that, sometimes it takes Google a while to find and index the backlink and sometimes it will just decide not to bother because it does’t rate the quality of the content on the site where the link is. It’s important to ensure that you try to get links from other authority sites which are relevant to your keywords.

You should also control the rate at which backlinks are built. It’s all about being natural. Sure, if you have one piece of content that goes viral, you will get lots of links in quick succession but this probably wouldn’t happen on a regular basis so keep an eye on the linking strategy and build at a slow and steady pace.

So there’s a basic seo strategy for you to bear in mind right from the outset if you want to achieve higher rankings on the search engines.

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Tags: SEO Strategy

This entry was posted on Friday, December 9th, 2011 at 8:30 am and is filed under Local SEO, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO For Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.