Understanding The 4 Basic SEO Elements

There are so many elements possible for you to optimize that you may not know where to start.

Search Engine Optimization can be incredibly complicated, as well as exceptionally uncomplicated; it all depends on what you focus on. Just like everything else in marketing, when it comes to SEO, you have what works the best, what is important, what is not so important, what doesn’t really matters, and what is useless.

Obviously, you should spend most of your time on what works and is essential, so today I have decided to highlight what I consider the 4 most important elements of Google SEO.

On Page SEO Elements

On-page SEO is where it all starts, that is with your own site. There are just so many tweaks and tricks you can apply to improve your on-page SEO, but out of all those, I only found out 2 elements that really makes a difference in your general SEO work:

  • Your Page Title.
  • Your Content.

Keyword in Title

Having your keyword in your page title is really important.

I comprehend some of you may perhaps disagree that you have seen a first ranking site without their keyword in the page title, etc…, yes you will always be able to find some exceptions to any rule if you really want to, but that’s not the point.

You are obliged to include the keyword you want to rank for in your webpage title.

At this point, having it in your page title doesn’t suggest that you have to spam your keywords all over either! For a good measure, judge against the top ranking pages, how often they use their keyword, this will hint you a reasonably good basic clue.

Keywords in content

Ok, when I talk about content, the golden rule is to write quality content; that is content that your readers will enjoy reading.

In all the search engines guidelines, you’ll see that it is recommended to write for your readers, and not the search engines!

That said, having your key keyword, and some additional associated terms here and there indubitably never hurt anybody.

That doesn’t imply you have to fill your content with keywords, it’s truly a waste of time, and in addition it possibly will harm you by getting you penalized for over-optimization.

Off-Page SEO Elements

If SEO starts on-page to get you indexed, there’s no doubt that it is your off-page SEO work that will get you ranked where you want to be in the search engines.

Among all the factors to take into consideration, the following 2 are critical to your success online:

  • Your site Link Popularity.
  • Anchor Text Of Your Inbound Links.

Link Popularity of your site

On internet, the popularity of a site is measure by how many pages, and preferably domains link towards your site or page.

Just imagine every one of thoseinbound links as a “vote”. In basic Google SEO help, the more votes a page has, the more popular it becomes, and thus the higher it should rank for the search engines.

Therefore your evident effort must focus on building quality inbound link in order to grow your link popularity.

And yes, the more respected a webpage or website linking to you is, the more you gain from it; equally, if the authority level of that webpage is very low or none, so will be the value of this “vote”.

Anchor text of the inbound links

The second key element of your off-page optimization is the anchor text of your inbound links.

The amount of inbound links do strengthen your popularity rank, however it is the anchor text used in those links that will notify the search engines what your website is popular for!

Let me say that again:

“The anchor texts of your backlinks tell the search engines what your site is popular for!”

So if you guess it right, your keyword should be there too.

Now, you want to keep things natural, so it’s important to vary your anchor texts, but as far as possible, offer your keyword or variation of it in the anchor text of the inbound links towards your site.

In Conclusion

There are just so many points to cover and learn about when it comes to SEO, and don’t worry, I’ll cover them all in my different free SEO training courses, but for those of you who are getting started or those of you who are getting confused at which element they should mainly focus on, this is the 4 elements of SEO that I consider essentials and will account for 80% of your search engine ranking position.

Pay attention on what works to start with, and sort out the rest later when you have time and opportunity!

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This post was written by Robjohn on August 22, 2009

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Why Google Doesn’t Index My Site?

This is most likely the most repeated whine in relation to doing Search Engine Optimization!

Given that you know that internet is going anywhere; you are possibly also aware that having a website is about as crucial today as having a cellular phone. It's a reality, whether you like it or not, that the way things are.

At this moment determined by the awareness of the fact that an online presence with a first search engine ranking in Google might dramatically change your business, you resolve to join the world of online business.

So here you are, you just have finished to build your website, and finally submitted it to Google and then… nothing happened!

What happened! So you go online and look for all the SEO help forums and sites you can find and post your thread:

Why Google Doesn’t Index My Site?", eventually, you will also state that you did everything, including submitting a sitemap, that you have a few inbound links, etc…

Google Indexing Process

Let’s review how Google proceed to index a page or site:

  1. You build a site.
  2. You submit it to Google.
  3. Your site is subsequently queued by Google to be crawled.
  4. Your webpage is crawled.
  5. Your site is analyzed.
  6. If it's considered appropriate it will be indexed.

If you want your site to be indexed, you must first make certain that it gets crawled, and unless Googlebot is informed of that, it's on no account going to happen.

Maybe a good way for you to start should have been to learn a bit about Google SEO, before you started, but since you are here already, let’s see what we can do about it.

It’s All About Crawling

Googlebot travels across the internet by followings links from different websites it knows until it discovers fresh or new content. Unfortunately, if your site is not linked by other crawled sites, Googlebot will never be capable to discover you, unless of course you opt to sent a submission request.

Fair enough you can do that, still it's not a great solution. If you reflect on just how many fresh websites are produced each and every day, not even taking into consideration the billions of websites that are updated, let me tell you right at this instant that the waiting list is going to be very long…

Just for your information, here’s the priority order in which Googlebot crawls sites:

  1. Fresh content from authority sites.
  2. Fresh content from other sites.
  3. Unsystematic internet crawling.
  4. Submission requests.

As a result by submitting your site for inclusion, you kind of come last on the list… in reality it possibly will take months literally!

Helping Googlebot

Googlebot behaves a lot like human beings, it doesn’t like to be told to do something, but rather do thing its own way, that is finding content by itself.

After you are crawled, regularly except if you have done something very dishonest, it's very easy to be indexed.

The easiest means for Googlebot to stumble on you is to be where it loves to crawl!

  • WordPress blogs.
  • Authority pages.
  • Applicable webpages.

As for your Sitemap, it's onlya tool used to assist Googlebot find out which pages you'd like it to crawl. Keep in mind, it's just a hint and doesn't warrant at all that Googlebot will crawl all the pages of your sitemap or index them.

In Conclusion

Remember, there’s a huge difference between having a page crawled and being indexed.

If you are really serious about getting an online presence on Google, I strongly recommend you to attend some kind of SEO training course, even free ones, just to make sure that you get at least the basic knowledge and understanding of what it takes to be successful online.

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This post was written by Robjohn on July 21, 2009

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SEO

The amount of processes, techniques and strategies used to make a web site search engine friendly are usually referred to as SEO. All sorts of techniques and strategies combine for the purpose of increasing page rank or improving the position a website occupies on the search result pages. It is known that most of traffic is directed towards those pages that appear first, because those have the highest relevancy for the web surfer’s query. By SEO, the page rank can be influenced, but the main search engines use around two hundred algorithms to determine the ranking as such.

google seo

Why is page ranking so important? From the point of view of the Internet marketing approach, SEO is a strategy that attracts more customers. The difficulty arises from the fact that SEO and keyword bidding go hand in hand, and the prices for keywords can be very high. Although, SEO does generate a certain return on investment, the virtual market is constantly changing and evolving, and so are the principles that govern search engine optimization in the first place. This explains why certain keywords become obsolete or show a poor performance even if at the moment of their choice they were top notch.

website seo

Significant challenges are encountered for businesses that target the international market, with the mention that this is often within the development possibilities of large corporations. For such cases, SEO has very advanced requirements, not to mention the necessity to translate the web page and register the domain name. Although the fundamentals of SEO are unchanged regardless of the language, there are lots of different issues that a web master has to address in order to stay functional and profitable in the conditions of an international business exposure.

seo

In case you want to learn about SEO and improve your site optimization knowledge, there are online guides, ebooks and informative materials that you’ll find useful. Search engines like Google for example have put together tutorials on SEO for the purpose of improving the users’ capacity to benefit from programs like Adwords. When there is a money loss or business failure, the profit registered by the PPC program is minimum, therefore it is all to their interest that a business should flourish to keep the money-making wheel going.

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This post was written by Robjohn on May 17, 2009

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