Despite the hundreds of factors that Google use to rank web pages there are two factors that stand head and shoulders above the rest and are consistently relevant to achieving high rankings.
On Page optimisation - although this encompasses a wide spectrum the key element is to match the copy on any given page (your home page being the most important) to search terms that you want to rank for. These search terms should be two to three word phrases and you should try and optimise for one to two phrases at most per page. Some key elements of on page optimisation are:
- Keywords included in Title Tag - a big factor. This is the title bar at the very top of the page, in this case 'SEO - What you can do yourself'
- Keyword included in Body Text - a big factor, obviously. Not much sense to try and get ranked for a search term that doesn't appear in the body of your text.
- Keyword included in anchor text - a huge factor. A link that uses Search Engine Optimisation to embed a link to the internal URL http://www.essentiallogic.co.uk/page/search_engine_optimisation is clearly going to be identified and ranked as relevant to users searching for 'Search Engine Optimisation'. This makes sense because the link is descriptive and tells the user what to expect when the link is clicked (although you can see we've used another technique and used pretty descriptive URLs, but that isn't always the case!)
Link Building - This is the process of obtaining / building links back to pages on your site. These can be internal (from within your own site) and external (from other sites). Google and other search engines assess links to your site and uses them as a gauge of the popularity of your site. Key factors to bear in mind are:
- It is not the number of links that matter so much as the quality of inbound links. If you have hundreds of links from sites that Google doesn't rate very highly then Google isn't going to use these as a positive assessment of your site.
- Not all links are treated equally. A link from an authoritative site such as the BBC would be viewed as a very high quality link and your rankings would reflect this. Additionally, single way links (i.e links in to your site without a reciprocal link back) are treated as more relevant than two way links.
