If you are building a website for the first time or have started to publish some of your written work online you may have heard the term SEO being thrown around. But what does it mean? SEO stands for search engine optimisation and is the active process of increasing your website’s visibility on the web. There are lots of elements that go into SEO and although it can be done on your own it does require a lot of time and effort in order to be successful. Let’s take a look at two of the most important elements that should be included in a basic SEO strategy.
Keywords
One of the most important things that you need to do when creating a website is decide on your keywords. Keywords are basically a single world or a phrase that people might type into a search engine in order to find your website. The good thing about keywords is that it is something that you have complete control over – you can choose your keywords and you can implement them into your website yourself. Keywords need including in your site’s content, in the URLs (if possible), in the meta tags, in your interlinks and even in the image tags. You should however stick to a density of between 1 and 3% per page as any more than this could look like spam.
If you are unsure about the keywords that you want to target a good resource is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This tool enables you to type in a keyword phrase and then see how much competition there is for it on the web as well as how many people search for your phrase each month. If you are just starting out, a low competition keyword is a good idea as this will make your SEO strategy that little bit easier.
Backlinking
Now the keywords we mentioned above are the easiest part of an SEO strategy to accomplish. Why? Well because they are a part of on-page optimisation which basically means they are on your site. Backlinking on the other hand falls into off page optimisation and this isn’t as easy. In order for your website to appear high in the search engine rankings, the search engines want to know that it is relevant. One of the ways that they determine this is through the amount of links from other websites that point to your website.
Therefore a backlinking strategy involves encouraging other websites to link to your content. If your site is huge or well known the links will come naturally but as a newbie to the internet world, you will need to put a bit more effort in. Some of the things you could look into include forum posting, social media marketing, guest blogging and blog commenting. When linking you will want to try and link back to your website through anchor text – anchor text is the text that is linked to and should be your keyword phrase – in order to increase your rankings for your specific keyword.
SEO is not easy but it can be done. If you are willing to put the time and effort in there is no reason why a new website could not compete with more established websites in the same niche.