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Search engine, such as Google, looks for websites matching with keywords people are looking for. Google ranks the matched sites based on:
Relevance, i.e., similarity of your websites to input keywords
Authority, i.e., the impact of your website over the internet
Relevance
A search engine looks for keywords in various parts of a website. This includes, but not limited to, title, anchor texts, contents, and so on. Knowing this, you need to figure out which keywords your target people would look for, and place those keywords in various parts of your page. But choosing keywords could be tricky because of two following factors
Volume, which refers to the number of people search on that keywords.
Difficulty, which refers to the difficulty in getting your page rank well.
Choosing keywords with high volume increases your audience. However, since everyone tends to choose popular keywords, it is difficulty to beat everyone.
Here is a winning strategy for picking keywords. Start with relevance. Think of what your potential customers would type in, not how you would describe yourself. Next, determine volume and difficulty. Pick the best ones. If you are new, you might want to pick low-competition keywords. If you are growing, you might want to pick high-volume keywords. Use analytics to see which keywords your audience were looking for in order to get to your blog.
Authority
Google determines the impact of your website based on inbound links. Here are a few factors:
- Total number of inbound links
- The number of sites that have an inbound link to your site
- The number of inbound links in one site (less is more)
- The authority of the site hosting the inbound links
- Anchor text of the link
- Do-Follow attribute: If the link is set to ‘no-follow’, Google will give no value to the link. Today, most sites set all links in the comment section to be no-follow.
The most straightforward way to have an inbound link is to email other website’s owner, requesting for putting links in his or her site. Gather information from the site. Make your content highly relevant. Personalize email for each site. Tell the site owner why your link would be beneficial to them. Send an example blog (not your home page) which is specifically useful to the owner or the audience of the site.
Optimizing Your Page
In order to get good relevance, you need to match your page with keywords:
Page Title
This is the most influential in the view of Google. Optimize all pages (not just your home page) in your site. Here are a few tips to write page title:
- Put keywords on your page title
- Important words first
- Make catchy title so that people want to click on
- Put your company’s name last. People who are looking for your company will going to search for your company anyway. By not putting your company name, you allow other important keywords be there.
Meta Description
Google does not use description of your webpage in their search algorithm. So, you don’t need to put keywords here. But, if your page appears on the search result, your description would usually appear next to the result. Interesting page description would entice audience to click through. Here are a few tips to write page description:
- Keep it short: 1-2 sentences; no longer than 140 characters; Google truncates long description anyway.
- Have unique description for every page
- Contain keywords: Google displays keywords in search result using boldface. If your description contains keywords, it would look more interesting to people.
Domain Name and URL
Google uses URL as one of the search criteria. Keywords in your URL (e.g., …/video) increases the chance of getting found. In addition, when others write an article about your site, they might not create anchor texts but just put your entire URL there.
Headings
Headings divide your article into sections. They make your contents easier to consume. Use headings to help your audience skim through your articles. Google also crawls your headings. So, it makes senses to have keywords in your headings. Here are a few tips to make great headings:
- Include important keywords into your headings.
- Make headings short so that the keywords stand out.
- Tag your heading to let Google know that this is your heading: Use a single H1 header on each page, and use multiple H2 and H3 headings.
Images
An ‘alt’ attribute lets you specify texts which explain the image. Google understands this image, by the ‘alt’ attribute. In addition, people whose browser cannot read the image can still understand your content in text form. So, put an ‘alt’ attribute for all your images.
Paid v.s. Organic Google Search Results
These are two kinds of search results. Organic results are the actual search results. Paid results, on the other hand, are essentially advertisement. For example, with Pay Per Click (PPC)), Google shows your page on the advertisement section and you can pay Google based on how many times people clicks on your link. PPC isn’t just advertisement. It also helps determine which keywords the clickers were looking for. You can then use those keywords to optimize your blog. PPC is good for beginners. But, it’s hard to budget as its cost depends on volume and competition. Organic results, on the other hand, depends on your contents. You don’t have to pay Google, and people are more likely to click the links. In a long run, you should focus on organic results, rather than paid results.
Blackhat SEO
Google software has limitation. Blackhat SEO exploits these limitations and tries to trick Google. If you do this, you are risking having your website banned by Google.
- Link farms: Create a farms of links to your webpage in order to trick Google to think that your webpage is of high quality.
- Automated content generation or duplication: Write a software to copy content from other website and post on your website automatically.
- Keyword stuffing: Put a lot of irrelevant keywords in your website.
- Cloaking: Create another version of contents (apart from ones understandable by human) designed specifically for Google crawler.
- Hidden text: Use white font color and white background to conceal the text from user, while letting the search engine see the text.
- Gateway: Send users to other websites as soon as they click your links.