If you’re focussing on an organic search engine optimization campaign, you’re probably looking for ways to forge natural links. One of the best things to emerge for link building in the last couple of years has been the social media. The contacts you make during your social media marketing campaign can be a rich source of links, and here’s how to do it.

1. Seek out other businesses, and get excited about your business. One key to making your SMM campaign even more productive is genuine engagement. Give yourself time to get into interesting conversations with business owners in your industry. These business relationships are the first step to quality, long-lasting links.

2. Pay attention. Links are given on social media all the time. When you see a link being shared that’s relevant to your keywords, take note of who’s sharing it. Chances are, that social media user makes a habit of sharing interesting links. You can make use of such habits. Talk to us at www.SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk about this.

3. Build your presence. Your search engine optimization company is likely to have encouraged you to participate in social media to build up your reputation. This can help with link building as well. In building up awareness of your business, you are essentially enhancing your reputation. This makes link building a little easier, acting as a pre-introduction of sorts.

Social media campaigns bring about a lot of indirect benefits, and smoothing the way for link building is one of those benefits. Keep an eye out for opportunities.

It’s easy to get bogged down with content for search engine optimization. Your SEO company decides that you need to post something fresh every day, and suddenly you find yourself in the middle of a hectic publishing schedule. Where once you might have posted when you had something of interest to say, you find yourself suddenly having to make up interesting things to say on cue. It’s not the best beginning for good content, and it doesn’t help with search engine reputation management.

Believe it or not, there is a trick to composing quality content, day after day. It begins with knowing the four cornerstones of quality content for SEO.

1. An interesting topic. The first thing to think about is how to grab your audience. Keep tabs on industry conversations for ideas.

2. A simple way to say it. Simple approaches work best on the net.

3. A unique angle. This is another key to catching attention.

4. A keyword fit. The SEO angle shouldn’t be forgotten. Working keywords in is much easier when the content topic is related.

Good SEO content doesn’t have to have all four of these things. You can probably get by on just two or three. If you’re after excellence in your content, however, you should aim for all four.

Composing content is not every site owner’s forte, and you can discuss content with us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. Having a process for creating content does help. When planning out your content, use these four cornerstones as your beginning.

A lot of site owners avoid the Meta robots tag and their robots.txt files, simply because they don’t understand either of them. As a part of code, both can be shrouded in mystery to the average non-tech business owner. They really aren’t all that much of a mystery, though, and they can be used to assist your site’s search engine optimisation.

First things first: what is the Meta robots tag? The Meta robots tag is a part of your code that communicates with the search engines. Just as it says on the box, it is an HTML Meta tag that communicates with robots. Robots don’t always do what it says, notably malware robots that ignore it to get on with their malicious deeds, but it’s an important part of your site’s communication with the non-human forces on the net. The robots.txt file, on the other hand, is a file in your root directory. It does pretty much the same thing, and is effective on all robots.

Issue 1: Meta robots tag vs. robots.txt

Both of these communicate with robots, and are practically the same. The differences are significant, though. Some webmasters recommend the Meta robots tag because you don’t have to access the root directory to alter it. This makes it helpful if you don’t have access. On the other hand, many recommend using robots.txt because it is more reliable, and prevents crawling by search engines as well as preventing indexing. If you’re using one, you don’t need to use the other.

Issue 2: Why would you need to use either the Meta robots tag or robots.txt?

A lot of sites choose to leave these alone, but both the Meta robots tag and robots.txt can be used to sculpt the search engines’ communication with your site. For example, if you have pages you don’t want Google to bother about, then a simple instruction not to index will mean the page is left alone. If you do this in your robots.txt file, the search engine spiders will leave it alone permanently, whereas if this command is in your Meta robots tag they will come back to check whether you’ve changed your mind.

Other things that can be handy in terms of search engine optimisation include the use of the nofollow tag, the instruction not to archive, which prevents a cached version appearing in the SERPs, and the instruction not to take snippets. When you have an instruction specific for Google in your Meta robots tag, you can address it to Googlebot.

Issue 3: Seriously? Using ‘nofollow’ in my own pages??

Using nofollows can help you to sculpt the search engines’ experience of your site, for example when you want more attention paid to a particular internal link. The Meta robots tag and your robots.txt file can help your site, and they can hinder it. If you’re at all uncertain about what effect the changes you’re making to your code are going to have, it’s best to consult your SEO company.

Search engine optimization does not begin and end with driving a site up the search engine results pages. It may be very important to make the site of an online firm more visible, but it is necessary to exploit higher traffic volumes effectively for the firm to receive a sustainable higher rate of profit. Close cooperation between a SEO company and an online firm is thus advisable. One of the important aspects of any site is how its landing pages ‘greet’ visitors. It may be of use to explore this issue in some detail.

The page a user will initially be brought to is dependent on the link on which they have just clicked. Most visitors, therefore, will come to a site via its homepage in the first instance. Hence a homepage should obviously be of exemplary quality. However, some users will inevitably enter at other pages. This fact is of crucial importance because if alternative landing pages are below par potential business may easily be lost.

It is worth investing considerable time and energy in assessing the pages of the site under scrutiny. It is a question of evaluating their suitability as landing pages. By looking at them as a user would, the attempt should be made to judge how well they might serve in the role. The views of a colleague or a discreet independent individual could be obtained. However, they may need guidance with regard to what they ought to be looking out for.

The first thing which should be examined is whether or not a specific page has the right type and quality of content to work effectively. A superior landing page has to house high grade content which is above the average level in the sector concerned. The content must, of course, be accurate. Moreover, the tone has to be appropriate for the sector in which the site is operating. Furthermore, it has to be highly relevant to the target audience. It should of course be remembered that users can have short attention spans so the content should be divided up into digestible portions. It is also prudent to keep in mind that ease of understanding is paramount.

The second thing to pay attention to is the layout of a page. If it is over-complicated, users may become confused. The majority of users do not wish to struggle through a mess of advertisements and graphics. Simplicity is one of the secrets of success. Excessive ostentation can prevent a page from working effectively as a landing page. In addition, it is pivotal that users can move on easily from the page which they land on to the page they desire to visit.

Landing pages are so important because an ongoing SEO campaign involves strenuous effort. This effort is time-consuming and uses other limited resources. If the landing pages are not properly planned, if users do not receive the reception they warrant, the effort made in making the site more visible will be partly wasted. Maximising the benefits of SEO is made easier if the landing page issue is adequately addressed.

Search engine optimization is a pretty varied discipline, involving such diverse practices as social media marketing (SMM) and content creation, it is therefore easy for an SEO practitioner to wage a campaign that is misconceived. In fact such problems can be seeded even before you embark on your SEO campaign! Like in any competitive enterprise, therefore, if you get the initial stages of SEO right, you stand a good chance of creating an online presence that is not only highly visible, but long lasting.

With this in mind, before you allow your SEO campaign to branch of into a diversity of arenas you’ll need a sitemap. In simple a terms a sitemap is a list of your site’s pages, accessible to users and most importantly to a search engine’s bots. The actual mechanics of this arrangement are not really discussed in this blog, but needless to say, it will have a pretty big effect on your SEO strategy!

Sitemaps and users

Before we get on to the SEO advantages its worth expounding benefits of sitemaps for a user; specifically they allow easy navigation to all the pages of a webpage via just a couple of clicks; this obviously has a practical usage, but it should also emphasize the advantages of creating a sitemap.

The Importance of Internal Linking

Its fair to say that SEO is obsessed with links and link building strategies, however it link building doesn’t just mean links from external sources; and the links within your page are equally important. A sitemap, therefore, could become a prolific source of internal linking, as well as providing access to the deeper regions of your page (i.e. deep linking.)

Get your site noticed!

Your SEO campaign will be a late-starter (if not a non-starter) if it takes a search engine’s crawlers months to index the entirety of your pages (i.e. with subpages included.) Instead, if you want to be indexed in days rather than months you need a sitemap – remember your page doesn’t just consist of a single url, but it is essentially a collection of pages, each with an equal shot at getting a good position in the search engine’s results; it is essential therefore that the search engine’s crawlers are aware of every facet of your page, and the best way to do this is with a sitemap.

How to Make an Effective Sitemap

For your sitemap to be search engine optimisation effective, basically it needs to be easy to use. This might be an obvious point, but it is an important SEO principle – what’s good for a user is usually good for a search engine, and by making your sitemap as easily navigable as possible it will appeal both to visitors (who will then create internal links) and to a search engine’s bots who will index your page. In order to create an ultra-usable sitemap therefore, you should fill it full of descriptive text (not keyword stuff!) and perhaps delineate your links by theme, making navigation as organic as possible.

On-page and off-page SEO are essential dual strategies for improving the status of your website in the search engine results pages. While on-page search engine optimization is sometimes sacrificed at the expense of the other because off-page search engine optimization yields results in less time, it is better to regard them as equally important in the short and long term success of your website.

Before examining on-page and off-page SEO in greater details, let’s have a look at the generally accepted definitions of both.

Definitions

On-page SEO refers to the on-page optimisation of the pages that make up a website. This work is usually focused on the keywords that make up the copy, or the content, on the web pages. This also refers to technical aspects such as site validation, meta tags and fixing any broken links or sitemaps.

Off-page SEO refers to the optimisation off the pages of the website. Amongst other things this includes maximising links that come off the pages so that they encourage higher placing in search engine results, and other link building strategies.

Why are they both important?

Search engines locate websites because they are drawn to their keyword-rich content. They are also drawn to websites by the amount of incoming links to that site – the existence of these incoming links depend on your website being well-regarded by others. And what does this regard usually depend on, but the quality of your on-page content.

You could almost argue that if you had to choose just one, that on-page search engine optimization is more important. Good on-page SEO gives both search engine spiders and human users the information they are looking for, meaning better results and greater traffic. In the long-term it sets up your site as an attractive option for other sites to link to, thus creating the basis for good off-page SEO. However it is by no means the full picture.

But why choose just one approach? Good SEO depends on a holistic treatment which utilises all search engine optimization tools available, so incorporating on-page and off-page SEO really is key.

Tips to improve your on-page SEO

Content is king; make sure your keywords are well-chosen after selective and careful research. Use keywords in title tags, meta tags and headings. There is a fine line between too few and too many keywords – go for five to seven for every five hundred words.

Think about the structure of your site because search engine spiders love site maps and internal linking – it makes your site more attractive to them and therefore yields better results – but the ease and usability of your site also appeals to human users. Check and eliminate broken links for the same reason.

Tips to improve your off-page SEO

Links are key with off-page SEO. Use keywords from a large list in links (as with on-page SEO, ensure the keywords are chosen after research, testing and selection), in link-ads (which you should track) and near inbound links.

Linking to other sites is important too. Link exchange was the most popular of linking to other sites, but this trick has fallen out of favour with SEO link building due to the search engines frowning on it. Now the key is to try and get one-way inbound links, preferably from high-ranking publisher sites. Linking to sites such as these immediately boost your site’s ranking by positive association, so while they are hard to come by it is worth trying to make these relationships.

It is one of the persisting myths of SEO that it is a discipline that compromises quality just with a view to attracting a search engine’s ‘bots’. In fact the opposite is true, and ‘white-hat’ SEO is actually a great way to not only bolster your page ranking, but to create some informative and fulfilling content – so everybody wins!

Firstly, an important distinction needs to be made between ‘black-hat’ and ‘white-hat’ SEO, as whilst they have similar aims, they are immensely different. ‘Black Hat’ uses every trick in the book in order to increase the ranking of a page in Google; however it is essentially a self-defeating process. Specifically black hat search engine optimization seeks to reap all the advantages of optimization without essentially giving something back to the user; therefore its techniques are often crude. So, for example, black hat will concentrate on keyword density rather than content quality with a view to tricking Google’s page crawling bots into thinking that it offers relevance and quality. Ultimately, these ‘black hat’ techniques are not only unethical, but they are in fact flawed; and Google’s algorithms are actually engineered to omit pages that are essentially ’spam’. And even if a ‘black hat’ page does make it to a prominent ranking, it’s only a matter of time before it’s is noticed and eviscerated.

If you want to increase your page ranking in a permanent and ethical way, the solution is simple – ‘white hat’ search engine optimisation! As the name suggests this is the ethical side of optimisation, which is not only accepted by Google but it is actively encouraged! In our rush to be ethical with our optimisation, we shouldn’t forget our aims, however and whilst quality should always be integral to our endeavours, for SEO to be successful you need to pretty clever along with it!

For example, whilst it is true that websites should have considerable visual impact, and appealing design features, you should remember that a search engine’s website crawling bots are looking for valuable words, not clever flash animations or the like, and therefore if you want to ensure a decent page ranking you might need to change what it there currently and start incorporating some good old fashioned text!

Whilst you might think that this is a compromise in terms of quality, it needn’t be and a blog section on your website will not only be a boon to those all important bots but can really add an extra dimension to the entire.  Submitting your blogs to social media sites can also help your off page SEO efforts by building links. The key to this of course is to incorporate copywriting that balances integrity with keyword density!