SEO FAQs Infographic – A picture is worth 1,000 (key)words

Let’s start simple: What are the parts of your website that affect your organic SEO Google rankings?

Thanks to the infographic below, we can take a look at the different ranking signals that Google uses to determine your ranking position in their search results.

Keyword Research

The first section of the graphic talks about the effect of long tail keywords vs head keywords. You can see the relationship between the volume of searches, the competition and the and commentary about the higher conversion rates for longer tail keywords.

This makes sense when you step back and think of an example. If you are looking to buy a new watch, and you know you want a men’s watch by Invicta. Then the likelihood of you getting an e-commmerce website that sells Invicta watches for men is very high. To the contrary, if you typed in ‘watches’, then the likelihood of you finding an online retailer who sells Invicta watches is much less. So users like yourself want to get the best results from your searches, and hence will type in longer keyword phrases to guarantee that.

A website’s architecture and link structure is very important!

The graphic shows how pages should be linked in a hierarchical structure, very similar to what you would find in a bread crumb trail on a website. The thing to note here is the more clicks it takes to get to the page, the less importance it is given. So keep that structure tight and link to the top priority inner pages of the website directly from the home page.

On-Page Optimization

The graphic gives you a nice list of technical items that must be optimized for the page to rank well. The top priority ones to worry the most about are:

1. Page Title – Make sure your keywords are in the page title
2. Page Headings in H1 and H2 tags – Reiterate your primary keywords in these headings
3. Body Text – You must include keywords within the content of the page.
4. URLs – If possible, your URLs should have the keywords most associated with that page

Link Building – This is for all the marbles!

In the old days, a website developer would tell his clients, “I built your website perfectly SEO optimized. You’ll rank #1 on Google in no time.” If someone told you this in the past 10 years, they are a liar or are just uneducated about SEO.

The question to ask yourself is… if 2 websites perfectly optimize their pages for the same keywords, which will rank higher? The answer is whichever website has more ‘votes’ or inbound links pointing to it. Google feels that if other web sites are willing to place a link on their site to yours, then you must have great content on your site. So each inbound link is a vote for your site. In the end, the site with the most quality inbound links gets ranked the highest.

What are some of the best ways to get these links? Well you can create blog posts, comment on other industry related blog posts, take part in forums, discussion boards, write press releases, and so on. But each link you create must use the targeted keyword as the anchor link when linking back to your site. For example, if you want to get ranked for the phrase “ranking #1 on Google”, then see the bad and good examples below:
Never use this format: For more information on ranking #1 on Google, click here.
It should be: Visit our website for more information on ranking #1 on Google.

SEO Tactics – Tools and Strategies

This part of the infographic gives some good ideas of where to spend your time and energy with SEO. Some tactics are a waste of time, while other tactics are very effective. Notice that social media is part of viral content and is very high value. We will talk more about that next.

Social Media and Social Bookmarking Sites

This is where the worlds of Facebook and Twitter have changed the search engine ranking game. As you can see from the graphic, it’s all about sharing great content! In this example, you can see that someone wrote a great blog post on Blogger and without any effort on their part, other blogs, social bookmarking sites, then Twitter and Facebook all spread links to that blog post. This is the power of viral marketing and social media. Not only does this drive direct traffic to your content, but also is a major component of Google’s search engine ranking formula.

To get more information on SEO and how social media can help you drive more traffic to your website, click around on our site and contact us to discuss.