It’s no secret that gaining great search rankings makes it easier to achieve online business success. If you’ve just built your site and you want to launch it with the best chance of ranking well and getting traffic, then read on.

So, you’ve got your new site and you’ve already worked out what your commercial goals are, you just now need a way to reach them. Welcome to the world of SEO. Now you can bring in traffic, convert it to make sales and build your brand name through the exposure that search engine rankings can bring.

It takes commitment, dedication, resourcefulness and relentless persistence to perform well in Google. Google is forever changing their algorithms, and this makes it a challenge for everybody. It’s important to keep up to date and monitor the changes so that your site continues to be competitive and perform well against your online adversaries.

Research shows that sites that appear on the first page of search results get the most traffic. Data like this that makes business owners and webmasters go all out to unlock the code to improved google rankings.  We all wish there were a magic pill that would send us to the top of the rankings overnight. Unfortunately, there isn’t one, and that’s most likely why you’re visiting this page.

Although there isn’t any magic, you can take action by following these steps to get to the top of the search engine results page.

Basic rules of SEO

To get you started, take a look through at some of the most basic rules of SEO.

Knowing these steps will empower you to optimise your pages for both the search engines and humans, and you’ll be aware of what it takes to get ahead through the use of smart on-page and off-page SEO.

We could start with exceptional SEO strategies that will put you head and shoulders above other sites, but of course, there’s no such thing as quick and easy SEO. It takes a concerted effort to get the entire site set up with SEO for long-term success. Not taking the time to do it properly is likely to get you penalised.

The steps you need to take include:

1. Understand the Google ranking algorithm
2. Measurement, measurement, measurement
3. Track and measure the right metrics
4. Be mobile friendly
5. Keyword research
6. Add on page SEO
7. Build your links the right way

Let’s explore each of these essential areas more so that you know what you need to do to get your website to perform better on search.

Step #1: Understand the Google ranking algorithm

You may not have ever heard of John Mueller but he is one of the Google bosses, and he has confirmed on Twitter that changes are made to the Google algorithm pretty much every day. The search engine expert website, Moz is under the impression that there are around 500 to 600 changes every year.

Although Google is in the habit of announcing major changes, they do not announce some of the details to the public. Most of the information that is in the public domain usually comes from the speculation and experience of professionals.

To find out the latest changes made to Google Algorithms, check out Moz’s resource on Change History.

Step #2: Measurement, measurement, measurement

As with anything that you want to improve, you need to start with where you are now. In this case, you need to know where you’re performing when it comes to your main keywords.

Check the speed of your site

As it’s one of the major ranking factors for Google, it’s important to know what the speed of your site is. If your site is running and loading particularly slowly, you are quite unlikely to perform well in the search engine rankings. This could also impact your ability to make sales to new customers too.

One of our favourite tools to check website speed is Pingdom. If your performance grade comes back at less than 50, then you should really do something about it.

When it comes to page load time, you should try to get something under 2 seconds.

Step #3: Track and measure the right metrics

Now it’s time to monitor some of the most critical measurements of your site so that you know what you need to work on.  These measurements include:

• Organic traffic. Most website visitors will be coming through organic search other than paid search. It’s also noted in this study that the most revenue comes out of visitors using organic search.
• Organic traffic conversions. In addition to how much traffic you receive, do check out what keywords are being used to bring that traffic to your website.

Step #4: Be mobile-friendly

The percentage of all searches performed on a mobile device continues to grow. There are now more searches taking place on mobile devices than on desktop computers. You can easily check whether your website is mobile friendly or not by entering your URL into Googles Test page for it. You’ll be informed of any errors or page loading issues.

Step #5: Use your keywords to create great content

You can add your keywords in all the right places, but if you don’t create great content that truly helps people then you still won’t perform well. One technique that is popular with SEO professionals is to use the hub and spoke technique. This is when you create one main page using your primary keyword and create other pages that lead off that page with long tail keywords. The result is a comprehensive and deep resource guide that readers should love and share. All those keywords will help your SERPs too.

Step #6: Improve your new site’s ranking on Google with on-page SEO

Now that you have a clearer idea of the keywords that you want to use to improve your new site’s ranking in the search results – you have what you need to make some powerful changes to your on-page SEO.

These keywords should be used in your page titles, sub-headings and in the alt-image field of your images.

Step 7: Build links the right way

A little-known secret of SEO success is to add anchor text above the fold for greater conversion rates. Another technique is to use images for building links too.

Conclusion

Helping your website to get established is well worth the trouble. It will launch it into the world of search and help it to perform well in the longer term. One of the best things you can do is to understand who you want to visit your site and what they’re looking for from you. Using commercial keywords as opposed to informational keywords can also help.

These are the steps to launching your website for better search rankings. If you need any help in improving your new site’s ranking, let us know and we’re here for you.

The post A Step by Step Process to a New Site’s Ranking appeared first on SEO Scoop.

Even if you’re new to the concept of SEO, you’ve probably seen anchor text in web pages. It’s typically in blue and underlined such as this link to the SEO Scoop homepage.

To put it in place, it’s either set manually by adding a piece of code or by highlighting it and adding a link using the content management system such as WordPress.

The code for the link shown above looks like this:

<a href=http://www.seoscoop.com>SEO Scoop homepage</a>

Anchor text can influence how well your page performs in the search engine results. For this to happen, the ideal format of anchor text is to use it to provide links to pages that are relevant to the page you’re creating.

Although anchor text is typically blue, you may also have your colours and styles set up in CSS or HTML to display it as another colour that is in alignment with your website’s colour theme.

Anchor text can be written to provide the reader with the context of the link. For example, you could add a description of what the anchor text is linking to. Your readers would find this valuable and this is something that is judged by Google with regards to understanding what topic is relevant to your site.

Search engines also use anchor text to provide links through to your pages. Although you may not be able to control all the anchor text that links through to your pages, you can control the anchor text that you use within your own site to your pages. You can keep the text you use descriptive, useful and relevant according to Google.

If many sites are linking through a particular page with a certain term, this can result in the page ranking well even if you cannot find those words in the text itself.

Different types of anchor text

Exact match. When it’s an exact match, the keyword will be one that is in alignment with what is on the page. For example, ‘SEO’ linking to a page about SEO.

Partial match. This is when anchor text uses a variation of the keyword on the linked-to page. For example, ‘building links’ linking to a page about beginners guide to building links.

Brand name. Sometimes a brand name is used as anchor text. For example ‘SEO Scoop’ linking to an article on the SEO Scoop blog.

Naked link. A straight URL used as an anchor such as ‘https://www.seo-scoop.com/.

Generic word. A generic phrase or word used as an anchor such as ‘click here’ or ‘more info’.

Images. When an image has a link, Google will refer to the text that is in the image’s alt attribute for the anchor text.

Best practice for anchor text SEO

The most important factor to apply here is to pay attention to anchor ratios. Using a controlled balance between brand match and naked url anchors in addition to keyword related anchor text is critical. Using only 1% of your content as exact match anchor text is critical to not over optimising.

If you discover that your anchors are not set up with optimal ratios, then try Link Pillowing. This strategy involves utilising guest posts that are low cost to balance out your exact matches with some brand or more generic anchors.

More recently, Google has become far more intelligent. They can now detect which keyword is most suitable for your article/link by determining the content around it. An example would be:

Specialist SEO agencies based in the UK would be a great starting point if you’re looking for search engine optimisation.

You could then use the anchor as “specialist seo agencies” if you were actually looking to target “seo agency uk”, “seo agency”, “search engine optimisation” etc.

Anchor text relevancy to the target page

As search engines have evolved, webmasters discovered how to manipulate them. This has led to search engines increasing their metrics. It helps to determine where sites and pages rank in their listings. One of the metrics now used is link relevancy or how well related the topic of page 1 is to the topic of page 2. If the link connecting the pages is highly relevant, it can help both pages to rank better.

Keeping anchor text succinct

Although there is not a specific length limit of characters or words when using anchors, it’s best to keep the link text to the point as much as possible.

In summary, anchor text done the right way can help with SEO results. If you would like to find out more about our SEO services, contact us for a no obligation chat today.

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