If you own a fitness/wellness website then you might have heard of SEO before. Here we take a look at important SEO techniques that can help improve your website search engine rankings.
What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
SEO is search engine optimisation; it is the art of creating or modifying a website to make it search engine friendly. Search engines are the gateway to gaining huge amounts of website traffic.
To gain rankings and places in the search results your website needs to be better search optimised than the websites that are currently showing above yours in the search results.
The more search engine friendly that your website is, then the greater the chance that the search engines will rank you more highly. By using certain SEO techniques you will increase your website in the rankings and hence increase your website traffic.
This is why SEO is probably the most important thing about having a website – after all, you can have a very good website but what is the point if no one visits it and buys your product?
Search Engine Optimisation Techniques
SEO can be performed site wide but the way we do this is by using the same SEO techniques on each page one at a time.
So although it is common to say a website is search engine optimised in fact we mean that each page of the website is search optimised.
Okay, so it should be clear now that SEO for your website is vital for your websites success online.
Now, the question is how do we start optimising a website?
As there are so many SEO techniques that we could implement in this article I take you through the three that are generally considered the most important by SEO experts.
Identifying Keywords and Key phrases
This step sets the scene for the web page we are about to optimise. We need to do some research using keyword tools, like Google Adwords. Using these two tools we can input our main term used on the current page we are trying to optimise.
We should record the results from these and then order by search volume. We then weed out any irrelevant terms and are left with a list of highly searched and highly relevant terms to this page.
Titles
Title of a webpage is an important SEO aspect of a webpage. It is vital that the title is unique, highly related and relevant to the content of the webpage.
We like to use between 4-10 words in the title tag and we always use the leftward rule.
Leftward rule is where the most important words (keywords) are closer to the left.
Make sure the keyword also appears in the description and throughout the body of the content.
Duplicating Web Page Content
Often websites reproduce information that is copied from other websites. The problem is that search engines are smart now and they check for duplicated content both within the same website and across all websites pages within their index.
It is very important to ensure your website has unique and useful content. You can write unique articles or you can find someone who will write unique content for you.
Importance of Choosing Your Keywords Carefully
Most experienced internet marketers would agree that choosing the right keywords mean you can see traffic trickling in faster and also see some sales, whereas going for really broad terms with tough competition means struggling for months and months to see some money.
Having a great list of targeted keywords is important. If you don’t, you will either have ineffective campaigns or you will waste a lot of money on pay per click campaigns, or both.
There is a fine line between a good keyword and a keyword that simply has too much competition.
You need to find the keywords that land somewhere in the middle between a decent amount of searches and too much competition.
Most rookie’s think that a keyword that gets a ton of searches every month is a good keyword to target. However, the truth is that such keywords are also hugely competitive which means it could take ages to rank.
On the other hand, long-tail- keywords with low volume can also be beneficial as its usually easier to rank for long-tail keywords (keywords with multiple words).
When doing your keyword research make sure that you carefully consider the parameters for the exact type of campaign you are planning on running.
For example, if you are running a pay per click (PPC) campaign, you’ll want to have a ball park idea of how much each keyword will cost you when it’s clicked on. The average cost per click is one of the details you can include in your keyword research. Of course, this is just an estimate, but it gives you a place to start.
Another thing you may want to consider is the amount of competition. This too can be found (an estimate only, it’s not a ‘solid’ number) when doing keyword research using the Google keyword tool.
All of this can be put together to give you a snap shot of what keywords are good ones to go after and which ones will most likely be a waste of time.
How to Build Backlinks
Backlinks are sort of like a road that takes your visitors from the website they’re on, to your website.
Though there are several ways to get traffic to your website, the one from Google search is still the most targeted (and also the cheapest).
Backlinks can help websites rank higher in the search engines; the more links (and relevant) you have, the higher your site will rank in the searches.
The more roads you have going to your site the more opportunity for traffic you’ll have.
Other important factors are quality and relevance of the back-link.
While search engines do not give out their code on this matter it essentially comes down to three things:
Relevance – The site the backlink comes from must have some relevance to your site. Links from sites that are similar to your own will be counted more highly than those from sites that have no relevance to your site.
The popularity of the site that the backlink comes from it very important. If a very large popular site links to you it is seen as a bigger endorsement than a bunch of very low page rank sites backlinking you.
Originality – The content of the site that backlinks you must also be original content. Google punishes copied material and links from sites that are punished are punished accordingly also.
How to Get Backlinks
- Write excellent content that will attract natural links
- Guest Posting on other relevant sites
- Posting relevant information on high-quality forums and blogs.
Backlinks are important to get traffic, but the quality of the backlinks have become more important in recent times.
So all those black hat techniques no longer work. And a lot of sites are able to get plenty of traffic by just focussing on producing quality content.
Alternatively, if you are serious about your business and have the money to invest, you can outsource every part of this process.
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