Simple Keyword Strategies To Outrank Your Competition

By Peter Brittain on July 22, 2018 in SEO

The internet has billions of web pages, and many of them are competing to be noticed by Google in order to move up the search rankings for that coveted page one of results. There are lots of SEO tactics and strategies that will help achieve this, and one of the most important is optimizing the page for the keywords you want to rank for. Here are some very simple ways to ensure that any, and all web pages on your website have the best chance of improving their ranking with the use of keywords.

Researching Keywords
The mystique surrounding keywords, and how best to optimize for them has led to countless theories and complicated strategies about how it should be done. In reality, optimizing a page for keywords is not that difficult, and only requires some very straightforward actions.

Keywords for SEO
The first of these is to do proper keyword research to establish which keywords and keyword phrases you need to target to be able to challenge those sites which currently occupy the first page of results within your niche. There are numerous keyword research tools available, with the most obvious one being the free AdWords keyword tool that Google offers.

If you really want to dig deep, to the extent that you know what keywords your competitors are targeting, how highly they rank for those keywords, and where they are getting backlinks from, paid tools such as Ahrefs can give you all that information. It cannot be stressed enough how important this sort of keyword research is. It can mean the difference between knowing exactly what keywords to target and then creating the content to match versus aimlessly creating content that achieves nothing.

The Correct Ways to Use Anchor Text to Improve Your SEO

By Peter Brittain on February 8, 2017 in Technical SEO

Whenever you create a backlink you can either have it be displayed as the URL that is pointing to or you can use anchor text which effectively cloaks the link. Using both methods will help your SEO, but anchor text links can have a greater impact in terms of letting Google know which keywords the page the link is pointing to, should be ranked for.

While this is a great way to help your SEO, the danger exists that you could overdo it by using the same exact match keyword every time, and instead of your anchor text links helping your ranking, they hamper it, as Google thinks you’re using spam tactics.

One of the ways to avoid any issues with Google is to mix up the way in which you use anchor text. There are several types of anchor text you can use for links, as you are about to find out.

Exact Match Keyword: Although we have already mentioned you should not overdo it with exact match keywords, it doesn’t mean you should avoid using them. The best way to use this strategy is for each page of content you have on your website targeting more than one keyword phrase. This means that when you are using anchor text in a link, you have more than more exact match keyword you can use when setting up the link back to the page in question.

Naked URL: We mentioned this is in the intro, but we need to emphasize that using the basic URL of the page you are linking to should happen occasionally. Google is far less suspicious of websites that have raw URL links than those which have only anchor text. The obvious benefit of this is higher rankings because you are not thought of as a site that is spamming.

3 Things Designers Need to Know About SEO

By Peter Brittain on July 8, 2016 in Websites

When it comes to relevance and visibility of content, every person who is looking to build a good online presence for their company knows the importance of good SEO practices. That being said, a lot of them fail to realize the importance of SEO practices when it comes to the design aspect.

There are some key concepts of SEO which experts are not exactly able to communicate with their designers well enough. That can leave a lot of problems because even if a website looks visually appealing, it might lack the crucial oversight of good SEO practices. That can affect the rankings significantly.

Here is a list of things that designers need to know about SEO in 2018 so that they can bridge the gap between excellent design and good SEO practices.

Mobile First
First things first, Google has made it quite clear for everyone out there that there is a need for optimizing websites for mobile phone usage with responsive design. The number of people using the internet through their mobile devices is more than those using it through their computers and that change in demographic needs to be catered to. Website designers need to make sure that the design of a website should not just be visually good for desktop computers, it can be equally well done but it will be more effective if it is optimized for mobile phone usage as a priority.

Organic Visibility
SEO experts are of the opinion that the website pages should be designed in a way that they are more accessible to search engines. This means the content organization for the website layout has to be on point.

Do Google Ads Improve Your SEO

By Peter Brittain on February 17, 2016 in SEO

It is often baffling to see experienced webmasters or website owners who use both SEO and paid advertising (Google Ads), but who never realise they complement each other in so many ways. They are blissfully unaware that by combining both strategies and using some of the data that Google Ads marketing can generate, they could enhance their SEO and rankings further than they already have.

From the outset, we must appreciate that each business’s ability to implement a Google Ads campaign will be tempered by the resources they have, not least of which will be their budget. However, even if you only have the means to set up a few small campaigns, you should do so, for the advantages in relation to your SEO which are set out below.

#1 Gaining Visibility for Keywords at The Top of The SERPs

Whenever you do search on Google at the top of the results you will see three of four listings with a little yellow box that has the word ‘Ad’ in it. This indicates that those listings have used Google Ads to appear there. Apart from the obvious benefit of having a 63% chance of your website link being clicked, being at the top of the paid results can help your organic rankings in the longer run.

Assuming your website is optimised, users who click through will spend time on your site and be clicking through pages, which is seen by Google as a positive. You also gain more authority and trust when you have a paid ad appearing on Google’s results. The goal is to get to the point where you appear at the top of both the organic and paid results. That is when you can really claim to be established.

What Factors Can Impact Google Rankings?

By Peter Brittain on August 3, 2015 in Ranking Factors

One of the biggest mistakes many website owners make is failing to measure the impact that their SEO activities have made. This is akin to following a diet and exercise program, and then not bothering to check your weight.

There are two specific SEO metrics which Google looks at very closely to see if the visitors they send to a website via their search results are having a good experience. These are ‘Page Views‘, and ‘Session Time’.

If you have a business with an online presence, it is not enough to have people visit your website; you want them to engage with the website and the content therein. The more that they read articles, watch videos and click through multiple sections of your website the better.

The level of engagement that a visitor has with your site, is measured by a metric called ‘page views’. A high number of page views tells you that visitors are taking an active interest in your website, whereas a low number suggests they are disinterested in looking through it.

This data is measured by Google, and if they see that visitors are clicking through to lots of pages on a website they will increase the ranking of that site. The reason for this is that they want their search engine results to show sites that encourage activity. One way this is achieved is with great content that users find interesting.

Compare this scenario to a site which has little or poor content and as a result, visitors very rarely click through to other pages. The page views metric will be low, therefore, Google reduces the ranking of that site.