SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is all about getting your website to rank high in an internet search, ideally on page 1. GOOD SEO involves many steps, and is vital to having your website rank well with the Search Engines. BEST WEBSITES does Advanced SEO on ALL of its websites - a $300 value, not included with other hosting companies. But please note that this alone will not necessarily get you on the first page in a search. Read more about ranking here.
To prepare your website for the Search Engines it is necessary to add meta data (keywords and descriptions) to every page – your page titles, article titles, sub-headings, and body content. It is essential that these components are not too long or too short, or your website will be penalized.
Your main keyword should appear in the URL (Universal Resource Locator) i.e your domain name of the page, the title of the page, within the first paragraph, and a few times more on the page. Each page should have labelled images and outgoing links if possible. There are many more “rules” that will determine if your Search Engine Optimization is functional and efficient.
Some Search Engine Optimization Guidelines
(included in all of our sites)
- The focus keyword should appear in the URL, at the beginning of the SEO title, in sub-headings, and first paragraph of content.
- The SEO title should not be too short or too long.
- The keyword/keyword phrase should be unique and not used on any other pages.
- The keyword(s) should not be over-used in the content, but it must appear a few times.
- The meta description/snippet should contain the focus keyword at the beginning, and must be between 120 – 156 characters
- The images on the page should be labelled with the focus keyword.
- The content should have a minimum of 300 words, more is better, preferably more than 900 words. Over 2500 words is ideal.
- Each sub-heading should not have more than 300 words following.
- Sentences should not be more than 20 words.
- Do not use a passive voice.
- The page should have internal and external links
- Permalinks, SEO titles, meta descriptions & snippets should not contain any stop words like “a”, “and”, “the”, etc
- Links are vital to SEO. You need internal links, external links and backlinks
Internal links are links from one page in your website to another page in your website.
External links are links that go to other websites. You must always make sure that your site remains in the background, or you will lose your potential client if they go to the external site and forget about yours.
Backlinks are the most important. These are links from other sites to yours, and the quality of the other site is very important. There are several ways of getting backlinks. The easiest is to buy them, but search engines frown on this practice and you could end up getting penalized.
The next way is to ask others in a similar or complementary business if you can do reciprocal links. Then you both benefit. I always add the websites that I create to this website as an initial backlink for them.
The way that I have found to be most effective to get backlinks, especially for local businesses, is to get Citations. It’s time-consuming, but you only have to do it once, and you will definitely reap the benefits.
After the SEO is complete for every page we will create a sitemap, which is a document that helps the Search Engines find all of your pages, some of which they might otherwise miss when they are “crawling” and “indexing” your website.
There are hundreds of Search Engines but only a few big ones like Google, Bing and Yandex. The smaller Search Engines feed off the big ones, so when we submit to the big ones, the small ones will also find your website.
BEST WEBSITES will optimize your website using the above-mentioned criteria. We will then use Schema Markup and Structured Data to send the right signals to the Search Engines in a language that they understand. Your listing with Google will contain “rich snippets” making your site stand out among the others, usually resulting in more clicks.
We will create a sitemap, verify the site with each of the big Search Engines, and then submit it at least once a month so that they will know your site is active and worth listing.
We will then teach you things that you can do to help promote your website.
Watch this short video to get a basic understanding of SEO.