Objects
The object of a website is usually to promote a service, a range of products, or information. For the promotion to succeed it must attract a lot of visitors who are looking for that service, range of products, or information.

The object of search engines is to list web pages that are most relevant to their visitors’ searches.

So if you want your website to be found in a search you must make it relevant to the words you want people to find you under.

Keep in mind also that most people only look at the first two pages of search results so if you are on page 5 then it’s unlikely that your target audience will see your website. If you are on page 5,000 nobody will see the website.

Domain names
Some domain names reflect the ego of their owners. Some use the initials of their business name or their own name, e.g. htwg.com. They may mean something to them and some of their friends but mean nothing to the rest of the world. There are initials which are known around the world, e.g. BHP. But to start from scratch with just initials needs the resources of BHP.

Some use their personal name, e.g. billsmith.com. This also maybe known to their local friends but tells the world nothing about what they are promoting.

Some use a well-known phrase, e.g. whoopdeedoo.com. Once again, although this is easy to remember, it doesn’t say what product or service it is promoting.

Startups using such names are doomed.

If you are selling gardening services then why not have the word gardening as part of your domain name, e.g. smithsgardening.com, gardeningtownsville.com. We once asked a website owner why the name they chose did not represent any products they were selling. They replied that they might some time in the future change to a different industry. They later closed their website due to lack of visitors.

Content
There are many websites that are very attractive with full screen image sliders but only fifty words on the home page. Google needs a lot of words on a web page to index it. In the eyes of Google a page with only 50 words is less relevant to a search than a page containing 300 words. Search engines don’t read images. So while a web page looks attractive, it’s a waste of time and money if nobody sees it.

Certainly you can describe your business in 50 words, but to compete with a million other web pages it’s a fact of life that you must provide more detail for Google.

There must not only be as much information as possible. It should be quality information. It should not be just padded out or repetitive. Google can detect such practices. Also, as it is online, sentences should be concise and easy to read, not rambling.

Some websites have only one page. But once again the quantity of information on competing websites means that the one page websites are not found in Google’s top twenty. so are unlikely to be seen. Why not add more pages of information?

All websites should now be responsive to mobile phones. A visitor should not need to zoom in and scroll sideways to read the content.

Headings
The page title of each page and the website title are very important for indexing by search engines. So if these do not contain search words then it is a lost opportunity. For example instead of pages titled About Us and Contact Us which do nothing for searches, why not About Gardening and Contact the Gardener (for websites on gardening). And don’t title the home page Home as a trillion others do! Be descriptive.

Navigation
It should be easy for visitors to find the information they are looking for. Large websites should have a search box.

Hyperlinks
A word or phrase on a page which is hyperlinked to another page is indexed by search engines with more importance that other words. So use search words for hyperlinks. This applies to email addresses, which are hyperlinked. So instead of info@… use a search word like gardening@…

Incoming Links
Other relevant sites with links to your website are counted by search engines as indicating your popularity. The more popular your website is the more relevant it must be. You can list your website with quality directories, local search directories and industry groups for such links. Don’t list with Link Farms. Search engines can see artificial popularity.

Common Sense
All the above tips are really common sense.

Imagine you are looking in a bookshop for say a book on gardening. You probably look first for books with the word Gardening in their titles. You would compare the size of the books and conclude that a book with say 300 pages has more information than a book with only 100 pages. You would look at the chapter titles to see if they covered the information you were seeking. You would ask the store which books were more popular.

The same principles apply to making a website successful.

You can always pay an SEO expert to improve your ranking with search engines. They usually charge $99 per month, but often only provide a lot of incoming links, which stop when you stop paying.

Have a website but no idea what to do with it? Have you ever heard of SEO? If you haven’t, you should look into it! SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the number ONE factor companies should focus on for their website.

What is SEO?

SEO is how you are ranked on Google or how well your website is being found online. This is very important for people with websites, whether you know it or not. Most people do not budget enough money in their marketing plan for their websites, and that hurts them! How you rank on Google is how people are finding you. Investing money in your companies website will help you in the long run.

Where do I get started?

If you have a WordPress website, SEO is super easy to put in place for your website! There is a plugin you can download called, Yoast SEO. Yoast is a super simple tool that can help companies get ranked for keywords! Once you download Yoast, go to every page on the backend of you website and choose a keyword for that page.

Keywords

Keywords can make or break your page. Using Google Analytics, you can find the keywords that will help your page rank well on Google. Spend some time researching your keywords and choose wisely. When using Google Analytics you will find a couple of different numbers. Don’t stress! The main thing you need to focus on is the competition of your keyword. When you choose a keyword, Google Analytics will tell you how high the competition for that keywords is. Be careful. If you are not a huge corporation and you choose a high competition keyword, you most likely will not rank. Type in your keyword and find a similar keyword that has a “low” competition level.

Another point, do not use your keyword on more than one page. If you choose a keyword for one page, make sure to research a similar keyword, but not exact. Choosing the same keyword for more than one page can cause your pages to fight for the top spot. Your pages will work against each other to rank, causing them to most likely not rank at all.

If you need to use the same keyword, make one page a “capstone” article page. This will separate the most important page to the page that has the same keyword. But only use this if you NEED to.

SEO Ranking and SEM Rush

Once you have your keywords, you need to track how they are doing. My favorite website to use for this is SEM Rush.

SEM Rush will help you track how your pages are ranking on Google. Try to do a report before you start finding keywords, so you can compare how it started to how it is doing after all your hard work. The best thing to do is run a report once a week. This will help you keep track of how your keywords are doing. SEM Rush will also run other reports for you also. It can tell you if you have any broken backlinks or need to create some alt texts for your pictures. All these factors can help with your SEO rankings.

Our ultimate guide is to rank our site for a keyword which has decent search volume. Before starting SEO, you must know how the search engine works. This article is about how to SEO. if you are a beginner and want to know how the search engine works, please refer some Moz articles.

I start with keyword research as its must and very first task in SEO. You cannot proceed further without a targeting keyword list. Now let’s see how to do keyword research with Google Keyword Planner. First, sign up for an AdWords account with your Gmail account. Once you login click keyword planner under the tool tab. Now click find new keyword ideas and type some services or product you provide through your website and select the country you want to target. Now you have a list of keywords with search volume.

Now you will get the search volume range, not the exact number. AdWords gives accurate data only to the accounts who running paid campaigns. If you want to know the exact search volume then, add the most relevant keywords into the account and click review plan. Enter the maximum value in the bid and change the tab from keyword group into keyword finally, select the exact match keyword then you get keyword and its search volume with competition details. Now you can select the most relevant keyword to your business and make sure that keyword has decent search volume.If you want some more keywords to check search volume manually, give a search on Google and pull the keyword from auto-complete and related search queries. You must select only one targeting keywords per page and select some long tail related keywords to enrich the page content. Now you have done the keyword research and have a list of targeting keywords. Now we move onto site audit.

We must understand what Google checks on our website before auditing a site. I will give you a basic idea of what are the ranking factors. Google first check the accessibility of a site, whether the site is loading fast and can be accessed easily by users. Even though I write this simply Google perform this in large-scale like from browser header code, redirection and code errors. Next will be search engine optimization to check whether the pages are optimized to search engines with proper meta tags. Starting from the title, meta description, keyword and social open graph tags.

Most importantly Google checks the authority of the website. In order to check authority, the major factors will be the number of links referring to the website and its quality, and it checks domain age, domain expires, server IP, social signals brand mentions and the website traffic. The authority will be the most powerful factors to beat the competitor and rank top in search engines.

Here I have mentioned only the major audit checklist if you want to perform a complete SEO audit on your site my advice would be to buy an SEO software. The software gives you an audit report, from that write an action plan and execute the plan on your site.

Finally, you must learn how to link building or backlink creating. I will explain the basis of link building. You can create backlinks from the online directory, classified sites, online forums, guest blogging and content marketing. My major methods will be content marketing and forum posting. Choose some forums which are related to your website subject and create a signature with your site links. Now create new posts or reply to the others who need your help. Make sure you know the subject very well before replying to the posts otherwise the forum moderates will kick off from the forum. Content marketing is very powerful marketing method. You must be very knowledgeable about your subject in order to market content.