A guest blog by Kaustav Ganguly from PrueHealthMarketing Home – PureHealthMarketing
What is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
SEO is a step-by-step process of getting a website to rank on Google search results. Google dominates the search engine market with a 91.9% of the market share and is used 89.3 billion times month globally. For these two factors alone, getting a website to rank on Google is the most effective way to grow your business and SEO is a free way to achieve this.
To rank your website on Google, you have to understand how to drive visitors to your website.
On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO
On-Page SEO is all about your website’s internal statistics:
- Title: Keep your website title between 580- 600 pixels in length. Contain your focus keywords, and make sure that there is no duplication. Ideally, you should keep your domain name in the title but it isn’t mandatory.
- Meta Description: This is an important aspect of On-Page SEO ranking. Must contain focus keywords and key phrases, and should be between 1000-1200 pixels in length.
- Crawlability: Every page on your website must be indexed.
- Language: The language tag must be defined in HTML code, example, en-uk.
- Charset Encoding: UTF-8 should be set correctly.
- Content: it should be around 800-1000 words in length. Keywords used in the title and meta description of a webpage or blog must be used within the content i.e ‘How to rank for SEO’. Keep average word count per sentence around 10-15, to increase due to readability.
- Mobile Optimisation: Google has made mobile optimisation a mandatory factor in its ranking algorithm. This means that if a website is not optimized for mobile use, it will be difficult for that site to rank.
- Image SEO: Every image must contain an alt tag
- Social Networks: Websites must contain social sharing widgets.
- HTTPS: It is essential for a website to have a valid SSL certificate (paid security certificate).
- Headings: Heading structure should be maintained, i.e. in order from H1, H2 etc.
- Load Time: Pages on a website must not take more than 3 seconds to load. Google’s ranking algorithm also factors in load time as a ranking parameter.
Recommended toolkit for performance SEOBILITY.
Off-Page SEO: what you do outside of your website which impacts ranking on Search Engine Result Pages.
Active Link Building: This is where you create compelling content on your website (e.g. blog article). Once there, share it on Social Media and newsletters etc. This helps to gain the attention of the Linkerati. Linkerati are power brokers who have the influence to drive traffic to your website by linking your URL in their site.
Another way of doing it is by writing guest posts for other websites in your niche. You can do that on websites such as Mashable and Hubspot etc.
Passive Link Building: A concept where you create a piece of content on your website that goes ‘viral’. It drives visitors to your site and get backlinks from influential webmasters without any promotion and marketing. Though it is not impossible, it is quite improbable, this scenario can take place when you get linked by someone without having to ask.
Black Hat Vs. White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO
These are good practices used by SEO Marketers to improve SERP results. Getting backlinks from verified domains with high domain authority, this is in line with Google’s policy and guidelines.
Strategies used for White Hat SEO are: –
- Researching and Implementing: This is where you research your audience to build an Audience Persona. Also, implement designs that are responsive, functional, increases site metrics and is visually pleasing.
- Good Meta Description: Add relevant information and focus keywords to drive in visitors.
- Valuable Content: Publish Informative content on your website that provides value to your audience.
Black Hat SEO
These are deceptive attempts at improving Search Engine Rank and directly go against Google’s search engine policy and guidelines.
Strategies used for Black hat SEO are: –
- Keyword Stuffing and Masking: This is where you stuff keywords throughout the your website and create a line of text full of keywords and mask them by changing the text font to that of the background.
- Duplicating Content: Posting plagiarized content from other places to your website.
- Redirecting: Redirecting traffic to a single website from keyword-rich domains that you buy up.
- Link Framing: Promising to follow links to other websites in exchange for the same, then not doing so.
Applying any of these strategies are quick way of getting penalised and even blacklisted by Google.
