Explained SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Simply.
What is SEO?
Search engine
optimization is the term used to describe a set of processes that aim in
optimizing a website for search engines. SEO is important not only for getting high quality visitors but it is
also a way to increase the credibility of a website and to expand brand
awareness.
Search engines are using complex algorithms to
determine which pages to include in their index and the order they show these
pages in the search results. SEO is the way to ‘speak’ to search engines in a
language they can understand and provide them with more details about a website.
SEO has two
major components, On Page and off page SEO.
On Page SEO
On Page SEO refers to settings you can apply on the website so that it is optimized for search engines. The most important on Page SEO Tips are:
- Optimized titles and descriptions
- Proper URL Structures
- User friendly navigation (breadcrumbs, user sitemaps)
- Optimized internal links
- Text Formatting (use of h1,h2,bold etc)
- Image optimization (image size, proper image names, use of ALT tag)
- User friendly 404 pages
- Fast loading pages
- Google Authorship verification for all pages
- Top quality fresh content (This is always the most important SEO factor!)
- External links (no broken links or links to ‘bad’ sites)
You can find
out more details about all the above tips in the SEO Tips for beginners article.
Unlike On- page
SEO, off-page SEO refers to activities outside the boundaries of the webpage.
The most important are:
- Link Building
- Social Media
- Social bookmarking
We will look at
these in detail below but first let me explain about the importance and
benefits of off-page SEO.
Why is Off-Page SEO important?
Search engines
have been trying for decades to find a way to return the best results to the
searcher. To do that, they take into account the on-site SEO factors (described
above), some other quality factors and off-page SEO.
Off page SEO
gives them a very good indication on how the World (other websites and users)
perceive the particular website. A web site that is useful is more likely to
have references (links) from other websites; it is more likely to have mentions
on social media (Facebook likes, tweets, Pins, +1’s etc.) and it is more likely
to be bookmarked and shared among communities of like-minded users.
What are the benefits of ‘off-site SEO’ to website
owners?
A successful
off-site SEO strategy will generate the following benefits to website owners:
Increase in
rankings – The website
will rank higher in the SERPs and this also means more traffic.
Increase in
PageRank – Page rank is
a number between 0 and 10 which indicates the importance of a website in the
eyes of Google. It is the system invented by Larry Page (one of Google’s founders)
and one of the reasons that Google was so successful in showing the most
relevant results to the searcher. Page rank today is only one out of the
250 factors that Google is using to rank websites.
More exposure – Higher rankings also means greater
exposure because when a website ranks in the top positions: it gets more links,
more visits and more social media mentions. It’s like a never ending sequence
of events where one thing leads to another and then to another etc.
Link Building
Link building is
the most popular off-Page SEO method. Basically by building external
links to your website, you are trying to gather as many ‘votes’ as you can so
that you can bypass your competitors and rank higher. For example if someone
likes this article and references it from his/her website or blog, then this is
like telling search engines that this page has good information.
Over the years
webmasters were trying to build links to their websites so that they rank
higher and they ‘invented’ a number of ways to increase link count. The most
popular ways were:
Blog
Directories – something
like yellow pages but each entry was a link back to a website
Forum
Signatures – Many people
where commenting on forums for the sole purpose of getting a link back to their
website (they included the links in their signature)
Comment link – The same concept as forum signatures
where you comment on some other website or blog in order to get a link back.
Even worse, instead of using your real name you could use keywords so instead
of writing ‘comment by Alex Chris’, you wrote ‘comment by How to lose
weight’ or anything similar.
Article
Directories – By
publishing your articles on an article directory you could get a link (or 2)
back to your website. Some article directories accepted only unique content
while other directories accepted anything from spin articles to already
published articles.
Shared Content
Directories – Websites
like hubpages and infobarrel allowed you to publish content and in return you
could add a couple of links pointing to your websites.
Link exchange
schemes – Instead of
trying to publish content you could get in touch with other webmasters and
exchange links. In other words I could link your website from mine and you
could do the same. In some cases you could even do more complicated exchanges
by doing a 3-way link, in other words I link to your website from my website
but you link to my website from a different website.
Notice that I
used the past tense to describe all the above methods because not only they do
not work today, you should not even try them because you are more
likely to get a penalty rather than an increase in rankings (especially when it
comes to Google).
The birth of black hat SEO
Link building
was an easy way to manipulate the search engine algorithms and many spammers
tried to take advantage of this by building link networks which gradually lead
to the creation of what is generally known as black hat SEO.
Google has
become very intelligent in recognizing black hat techniques and with the
introduction of Panda and Penguin they have managed to solve the problem and
protect their search engine from spammers. Of course there are still exceptions
but they are doing advances in every new release of their ranking algorithm and
very soon none of these tricks will work.
To “follow” or
“nofollow”
In addition to
the above and in order to give webmasters a way to link to a website without
passing any ‘link juice’ (for example in the case of ads), search engines
introduced what is known as the “nofollow” link. This is a special tag you can
add to a link (for example: “<a href=http://www.somesite.com rel=”nofollow”>Some
Site</a>) that tells search engines not to count the particular link as a
‘vote’ to the referenced website.
This was done
so that you can link other websites from yours without taking the risk of being
caught for selling or exchanging links.
As a rule of
thumb, you should add the nofollow tag on all your external links (within your
pages) that go to websites you cannot trust 100%, to ALL your comment links, to
ALL your blogroll links and to ALL banner ad links.
What is a good link?
So, if the
above links are not useful, what is a good link?
First you
should understand that link building it’s not only a matter of quantity but it
is a matter of quality as well. In other words it no longer matters how many
links are pointing to your website but it is more important from where these
links are coming. For example a link from a normal blog does not have the same
weight as a link from New York Times or a link from Matt Cutts blog (head of
Google Quality team) is not the same as a link from my blog.
The obvious
question is how to you get these links?
If you ask
Google they will tell you that any links pointing to your website has to be
natural links. Natural links are exactly what their name implies. A website
owner or blogger likes another website or blog and naturally adds a link to
his/her blog.
Does this
happen in reality or is it another myth?
It certainly
does but you have to try really hard to get to this point. Take for example
this blog, there are many incoming links because other webmasters find the
content interesting and I also link to other sites in my articles because I
find their content interesting and want to inform my readers about it. This is
natural link building where a link has more value from the readers’ point of
you rather than the search engine point of view. The best way to attract links
is to publish content (text, images, videos, infographics etc) that other
people would like to link.
If natural
links are what I have just described above, in which category do all other
links belong?
They belong in
the category of artificial links and by adopting such techniques you increase
the risk for getting a manual or algorithmic penalty by Google.
Is guest
blogging a valid way to build links?
Guest posting
can be a valid way to get links back to your website provided that you don’t do
it just for links and that you don’t overdo it. You can read these 2 articles
to get a complete picture as to when to accept guest posts on your blog and
when to guest post on other blogs.
Social Media
Social media is
part of ‘off-site SEO’ and if you think about it, it’s also a form of link
building. It should be noted that almost all of the links you get from social
media sites are “nofollow” but this does not mean that they do not have any
value.
Social Media
mentions are gaining ground as ranking factors and proper configuration of social
media profiles can also boost SEO.
Social Bookmarking
Social
bookmarking is not as popular as it used to be in the past but it is still a
good way to get traffic to your website. Depending on your niche you can find
web sites like reddit.com, digg.com, stumbleupon.com, scoop.it and
delicious.com (to name a few) to promote your content.
Conclusion
Off-page SEO is
as important as on-site SEO. If you want your SEO campaigns to be successful
you have to do both. When thinking about link building don’t take the easy way,
but try to get links from hard-to-get places. The more difficult is to get a
link, the more value it has.
In the past you
could easily get thousands of links and rank higher but nowadays you have to do
more than that. My advice is to forget about link building all together
and put all your efforts in making a great website, promote
it correctly and everything else will follow.
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