SEO or Search Engine Optimization is how to set up your website to get a better ranking on search engines such as Google and Bing. It is not enough for your website or blog to have great content; it needs to be visible on the web too.
Our webmaster at GreenEatz has followed these tips to give our website a boost up the Google ranks. A couple of months ago, the GreenEatz domain ranked just 13.5millionth in the world but now has shot up to around rank 660,000. If you search for Carbon Footprint Food on Google you will see our page Food’s Carbon Footprint on the first page of search results. Pretty good, right?
Help! What is SEO? How to Measure it
The first step is to find out the current ranking of your website. The simplest way is to go to Alexa.com and type in your website’s name. Don’t worry if your rank is in the millions… there are about 650 million websites in the world and rising! You can also add Alexa.com to your browser toolbar and check out the search engine rank of any website you browse.
The next must-have for SEO is the Google Analytics tool. You can sign up easily with a Gmail account or use any current email address. This tool gives you lots of useful SEO data on your website: who is looking at it, how long they spent there, what pages are most popular and how they found your page. You can then use that data to improve the performance of your website.
Help! What is SEO? Content and Keywords
Google is the world’s favorite search engine and it stands out because it tries to find the best web page for your search. The content of your website is the most important factor in improving your SEO rank.
When you write a webpage, the keywords you choose are critical. Use the Google Keywords Tool to try out different keywords and phrases that are the best fit for your website. You can also try googling the keywords you pick and see what comes up on the search page. The keywords or phrases need to be relevant to your subject and used throughout the page without going to excess. Putting keywords in headings or in bold also gets those keywords noticed by the search engines.
The SEO keywords you use need to be included in your page title, descriptions, image tags, and meta tags. Making sure the Meta tags are included in the HTML of every website gives search engines an idea of your website’s content. You can add them in native HTML code but website builders usually have tools to add them more easily.
Help! What is SEO? Inbound Links
Websites that link to your webpages are another big factor in SEO. Search engines are wary of spammers creating links to their pages. Therefore, your links need to be genuine and from relevant, trusted websites. Try to create links from other websites with good SEO ranking and from a variety of sites. Make sure that the text you use with links includes some of your SEO keywords but without being too blatant. This applies to internal links within your website too.
Help! What is SEO? Social Media
Social media has become another critical part of your SEO. Your website needs to include easy ways to share the content on Facebook, twitter and Google+ at the least. It shows the search engines that your content is liked and worth sharing.
Create social media pages on Facebook, twitter and Google+ etc. and link them to the pages on your website. If you can building up a following on social media, your website traffic increases and your SEO ranking goes up.
Help! What is SEO? Domain Authority
Basically, SEO domain authority needs to be earned over time. Your website domain gains in authority as it increases its page rankings, inbound links, amount and quality of content. If you add new content regularly, your SEO rank goes up. If you leave errors on your website such as out-of-date links, your SEO rank goes down. If you allow spammers to leave comments with links to their websites, your SEO rank goes down.
Help! What is SEO? Website Traffic
Google Analytics can help on improving your website traffic or number of unique visitors. Your SEO rank goes up the more people view your web pages. If you can keep them there longer and encourage them to view other pages, your search engine ranking gets better.
Help! What is SEO? Website Hosting
The search engines do not like sites that load slowly or that have lots of down-time. Make sure that your website hosting company is reputable with good download speeds to avoid a bad impact on your SEO. And use a popular website platform such as WordPress or Blogger as these are more likely to be tracked by search engines.
Let us know how your website is doing. Got any SEO tips on improving your page ranking?
Thanks alot for this elightening piece of information, i will surely follow you on this.
Nice overview Jane!
Thanks very much Jeff.
Well that is nice comprehensive guide to Search Engine Optimization.
Many thanks Imran!
I’d avoid reading too much into what Alexa says because it has a mind of its own that never seems to fit with reality.
I saw one site that I am involved with drop 5 million places with alexa when the traffic had actually increased as measured by Google Analytics.
The problem is that what Alexa measures is visits to sites by people who have the Alexa toolbar installed. Nice piece of spyware that wants to keep track of a lot of your browsing so I don’t have it.
Sadly though a lot is put in to the importance of a good Alexa rank. Personally, I look at what the traffic numbers are saying and never sweat them
Thanks Ian, it’s certainly worth knowing that Alexa.com is based on a subset of all websites. Do you know of any more accurate ranking tool?