Search Engine optimisation is the single most important investment that a business makes in its digital presence. You may invest in the best website with all the whistles and bells. You can also develop an awe inspiring social media presence. Nevertheless, unless SEO is well integrated to your greater digital strategy, then your competition will continue to gain the edge.
SEO has become a science. Using a competent digital strategist to set up an implement your SEO strategy will make your visibility grow exponentially. If you have a severely limited budget then having a strategy document drawn up will enable you to determine what you can do yourself and what you will need the strategist to implement. Strategists are excellent for helping you to determine your priorities. You can then decide in what order work needs to be done. When your strategist works as a consultant you will find that they will be able to help you stretch that search engine optimisation further.
Elements of SEO
SEO is made up of different elements. Search engine optimisation is planned as a process. First of all there is on page SEO and then there is off page SEO. On page SEO is the search engine optimisation that is built and developed on your website. It includes those digital assets that you host on your own servers. This may include your website, your blog and also your content that is hosted on your own servers, such as ebooks and video. Off page Search Engine Optimisation is developed by optimising your social media pages, your forum profiles and your visibility on other pages that are not owned by you. This includes the development and growth of high quality backlinks that will drive traffic to your site .
Content strategy
Content strategy is a core part of search engine optimisation implementation. To make it to the first page of Google, a new website needs to have between 75 and 150 pages of relevant content. It should be easy to crawl and links should be easy to crawl well within your site. Content should be rich. Video content, written web copy and interactive content should be included in your presence. It really helps when one piece of content links to another. A page that has been constructed using top notch copywriting will rank exceptionally well provided the rest of the web assets support the page .Web assets such as unique video and suitable outbound links support this strategy.
Copywriting
Good copywriting is the key to better ranking. As long as it is relevant and well written by a trained copywriter, it will make all the difference to how you rank.In times past people used to find ways around the algorithms in order to manipulate how a page ranked It often involved creating thousands of spammy links. It also could involve severely stuffed web copy with the keywords that the page wanted to rank for. Today copywriting involves very careful placement of keywords. Both the density and the distribution of the keywords will determine the quality that Google deems the copy to be. The better the quality, the better the rank.
Reviews
Off page search engine optimisation will include strategies such as review building. In the recent past you could pay for reviews. The larger review providers such as Google and Tripadvisor have gotten wise to fake reviews, bost positive and negative. Things such as location, IP address and Google search history and behaviour have a direct influence on whether a review will hold value. Professionals that build mobile and local SEO will also understand the importance of quality genuine reviews. Your specialist will know how to get good quality genuine reviews posted. Not on a single platform but on all the sites online that will influence your search engine optimisation positively.
Mobile Search Engine Optimisation
Its official. Google now affords higher ranking to websites and pages that are properly optimised for mobile. This is not just about being mobile friendly, It revolves around how your site responds to all mobile devices.Mobile and local SEO are intrinsically connected. more search is conducted using mobile devices than desktop and laptop devices. Most people that use a phone to search for a local business or service will choose the business that has been listed on the maps. Together with a business that has the most reviews, these factors will strongly influence the search engine optimisation and in turn the search engine rankings.
Building backlinks
Backlinks to your page should come from reliable high ranking domains. Because Google no longer publishes the rank that a webage holds, with backlinks is developed on sites with high domain authority. Locating and targeting these sites as a resource is something search engine optimisation specialists have the resources for. The problems that SEO specialists often have to face involve undoing the damage from spammy links. This is because small businesses sometimes look for the cheapest method to gain momentum to the appear on the first page of Google. While these methods are often successful, they are short lived and websites are often penalised by Google because of the black hat methods that wee implemented. Two dozen high quality backlinks will rank a site far higher than thousands of spammy low quality links. Backlinks from education sites are highly sought after and will be established by a good SEO strategist.
The Technical Bit
There is a lot of backend technical work that lay people don’t always realise needs to take place. The speed that your website loads will make a substantial difference to where Google places it in the rankings. This will be easier to achieve depending on how the website has been built. Additional technologies such as content distribution networks will also help optimisation. Additionally there are other considerations . The type of server and where it is hosted is a critical starting point. Server side hosting needs to be analysed and advised by a specialist. Even when you are starting off on an exceptionally limited budget there are options that will speed up web page delivery.
There is also a technical side to design. Headers are the first part of a website that Google and other Search Engines such as Bing will crawl. The code inyour headers needs to be clean and cluttered. That said the header should contain vital business information. Websites that contain information such as web addresses and phone numbers continue to rank above thse that don’t Small design tweaks can give you the edge.
Hire an SEO expert.
Would you ask a gas engineer to plaster your walls? While there are some aspects of SEO that you can do yourself, seek out an expert. Professionals will not only tell you what to do, but also what not to do. There are many reasons why doing it yourself is not a good reason. The core reason is that if you do it yourself, you are likely to miss out one or more core elements of the process. This will hamper your site from ranking and you may well feel deflated.When hiring an expert, there are two sides to appointing them. The first is consultancy. the second is implementation. Some professionals will offer both Seach engine optimisation consultancy as well as SEO implementation. Others will do one or the other. Most will help you keep to your budget.
If youre unsure as to whether you should try this yourself or whether you should seek a professional have a look at this article about reasons not to DIY SEO services