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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Posted under Site building.
This post was written by Robjohn on August 22, 2009



