Making Your Website Work for You - Content and Linking for DummiesCategory: Marketing
Article posted by: Rebecca Appleton
Let’s face it, search engine optimisation, or SEO, is a complicated subject ��" and not only is it complicated, but the professionals don’t even agree about what works best. It has however become clear that SEO is no longer something businesses can ignore, especially small businesses.
While there are many elements of SEO that a lot small businesses will find it hard to manage, and this is the reason most choose to enlist the services of a professional SEO firm, there are some considerations that all website owners should be thinking about.
The content and links on your website are both things you probably have control over, and are both parts of SEO that you can at least start to implement yourself. Easily the most important of all on-page aspects, a site rich in compelling and unique content will win big in the search results and with conversion rates. Content includes any text, images, audio, or video that you put on your website. For this article we’ll focus on text, since it is the primary way Google understands your website. The others need to be described with text in order for Google to register them, and for an explanation of the ways in which images can be optimised to help SEO you can either visit the Top Position site, or read part one of the Making Your Website Work for You series.
When approaching the content on your site with regards to SEO one fundamental rule applies from the beginning ��" content is good, more content is better and lots of content is best. Content is what search engines rank, and if you have lots of content you will have more pages that can rank, and therefore more ways to get traffic. While this simple rule serves well a basic principle of SEO, it does not mean that all content is good content. Content quality is also a significant factor in contributing to SEO. Good content will be relevant to your website and have relative keywords in it, so it is important that you don’t just put anything up on your site. This links us to our next point ��" keywords and relevance.
Keywords are words which potential visitors to your site might use to find a site in a search engine. An example of this would be the website www.holidaysuitcases.com, for which some keywords might be ‘luggage’ and ‘travel bags’. Things to consider when deciding on keywords are their competitiveness and how many times that word or phrase is searched for.
Unfortunately we have to get all of the definitions out of the way before we can link these points together, but don’t worry, all will become clear. Anchor text is a phrase you may or may not have heard, but it is certainly one with which you will become familiar. Anchor text is basically hyperlinked text on a web page, i.e. the text you click on when you follow a link to another page or site. An example of this would for “click here more information on SEO”, which would then link to a relevant page on the Top Position site explaining SEO.
Anchor text should give your visitors useful information about the nature of the page you are linking, and so a simple “click here” offers nothing. For SEO anchor text also tells the search engines’ assessors, or spiders, what the linked page is about, and if used wisely this can help boost your rankings. For SEO the more links your site has to it, on the web as a whole, the better your rankings are likely to be, and while anchor text linking to your site on other websites can be added by a lot of labour intensive directory work, blogging and social media, activities usually carried out by a professional SEO representative, you can control the content on your site so why not make it work for your SEO by including more links?! If for example you have an About Us page why not link some of your keywords to the relevant pages in your site. For example: “We are the market leaders in luggage and travel accessories...” Here “luggage” could link to your luggage product page, and “travel accessories” to, well, your travel accessories product page.
This is where site content, keywords and anchor text come together. As we know the more content you have on your site, the better, but we also know that the more links to your site’s pages the better. Keywords can unite the two. The more content you have on your site it is likely that you will have more keywords in your text, and for SEO the keyword is the perfect bit of text to use as anchor text. Without making your site look like a mess of blue hyperlinks, and with this in mind you might want to blend them into the text by turning them black, wherever it is appropriate you should use the keywords in text as anchor text.
Now you should be able to go off and improve your site for SEO purposes, but bear in mind that the use of anchor text should be kept in check. If you find links for links sake within the site, consider removing them. Too much of a good thing can be just as harmful as not enough; if every other word on your page is an internal links, you risk sending your visitor round in circles. If this happens, they will get fed up and leave, potentially costing you a sale.
Posted By: Rebecca Appleton
Web: http://www.dakotadigital.co.uk
Contact: e-mail
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