Google

Your key to Google SEO

Why’s Google so important? Simply because Google’s influence when it comes to the Internet is paramount. Google’s reach dwarfs all of the other search engines – at least in the Western world. In Great Britain, it has swallowed up 91% of the search engine market, leaving poor pickings for its nearest competitors, which are Bing and Yahoo. Basically, this means that 9 out of 10 searches here in the UK is performed by users typing their queries into Google’s all-powerful search bar. Understanding the tactics for how to improve your website’s SEO will unquestionably improve your business’ prominence in online search results. Your goal is to get your website as high up on page one of Google as you can and ideally to position one. Whether you can do this will always depend to an extent on the market you’re in. But, if yours is a niche service or product or you’re targeting a defined geographical area, the odds are pretty good of your at least getting to page one if you put in the SEO work and follow the basic SEO truths below. In the competitive online market of the Internet, SEO is more crucial than ever. Search engines are delivering up results to millions of users every day. They’re all searching for answers to their questions or for solutions to their problems. Used correctly SEO can help your business answer these questions and grow and meet your business goals.

More than 30% of visitors go to Google’s top pages

When anyone carries out a search on Google (or any other search engine) the order in which the returning results are displayed is based on complex SEO algorithms. These algorithms take a huge number of factors into account to decide which website should be appear in the first place, second place and third place etc. Pages in first position of natural results get a click through rate of 32.5%. So out of 200 searches they’ll receive 65 visitors. Second-place pages have a click through rate of 17.6%. So out of 200 searches, they’ll receive 35 visitors. Pages in the tenth position of the first page have a click through rate of 2.4%. Out of 200 searches, this represents less than 5 visitors. If you’re on the second page, you’ll have almost no visitors which is why it’s often said the best place to hide your website is on Google’s second page! For maximum visibility, you have to get yourself to the leading positions of the first page of the results. The closer you get to the top of the top 10, the more visitors you will have. So if you want the best optimization for your website in Google, a wise approach is to use the SEO methods that Google specifically recommends. SEO has the potential to put you well ahead of your competition. That’s especially the case in the fast-growing competitive market of the web. It means that even if two websites are selling the same products or services, the best optimized website is the one more likely to win more customers via Google and get better ROI. On this page, we’ll reveal what you need to know to do this and exactly what simple steps you can use to optimize your website for Google. The good news is that there simple tweaks you can apply to your website to increase your visibility!

The dual pillars of SEO for your website

While it’s true that Google uses more than 200 algorithmic SEO indicators to ‘score’ your website and determine its ranking for any given keyword, getting to grips with SEO means grasping the two fundamental foundations of online success. If you can nail these two SEO fundamentals, your website will be in great shape with a high potential to appear on Google’s page number one. And the more visible your website in Google, the more visitors you’ll get, the more conversions and the more ROI. What are these foundations? They are:

The way you use your keywords. This concerns placing the right keywords in the right positions in your on-page content.
The number of backlinks you can attract to your website. This concerns your encouraging other websites to boost your standing in the eyes of Google by linking to your website. .

So have you already completed your keyword research? Are you already targeting certain keyword phrases for each of your pages? If so, that’s great news. And we can help you ensure you’re using them enough and in the most effective places for Google … Click here to get your free offer. This link will take you to our online form where you can have all of the following carried out for you for free! We’ll set to work to analyse your website for all the keywords that are relevant to your niche according to Google. (If you provide us a list of keywords too that are most important to you, we’ll include these details in our analysis.) Our free analysis will deliver up to you all the following valuable information:

The precise number of potential customers looking for the products and/or services your website offers on a monthly basis.
Exactly which search terms (or keywords) they’re using or most likely to use to seek out your business offering.
The position your website has in Google for those queries or keywords (ie are you on Google’s first page or fifth?) .
How much it would cost you to move your website to the top and the best tactics to do this.

Take advantage of our free website analysis offer here

Using keywords for max effect

Your website content will fail to do its job and pull in the right kind of traffic if you don’t pay attention to your keyword use. So your starting point should always be keyword research. Keyword research is the marketing process that unearths the real terms that your target visitors will naturally type into the search bar. Doing your SEO homework to discover these powerful search terms for Google will pay dividends. Once you know them, you can employ this information to plan your website content and to work out your SEO content marketing strategy. What you are looking for are your specific high performing ‘seed’ keywords to base your content around. But how do you start? A good way to do this is to brainstorm the subjects you know will be of interest to your customers. If you have staff, get them to join in the process too. Examine your competitor sites to get a sense of the type of keywords they’re targeting. Then deepen your keyword understanding by using a keyword study tool. Google Keyword Planner is free to use and a good starting point. But there are many more complex paid tools available. Of course you can also outsource this detailed work to a keyword specialist who will then deliver you up a report with keyword lists, their competition and search volume. Your aim is to pin down the keywords that are specific to your website or business. Say you’re an acupuncture practician who deals with stress and anxiety relief in the Kent area. Then you will need to prepare content that will attract in the right traffic in Google. So you should be aiming for long-tail keywords such as ‘stress relief acupuncturist Kent area’ (including your location helps Google find you from among your many competitors nationwide) or ‘acupuncture therapy for anxiety relief, Kent’ or ‘acupuncture for anxiety and insomnia, Kent’. Just to clarify, a short-tail keyword is a generic one such as ‘acupuncturist’. A long tail keyword is one that gives more detail than the short-tail one. Using long-tails is a very effective tactic. This is because they’re tailored to your specific business and target audience. And while you may think they’ll attract less traffic to your site than a broad match term, be aware that the traffic they will attract will be much more relevant to your offering. . It is what’s described as ‘qualified’, ie. it separates out the visitors more likely to be genuinely interested in your services and to turn into interested customers. Now it’s time to get down to writing the content of each page. You should select a single long-tail keyword as the focus for each website page. Write your content around this phrase. But here’s a word of advice. Don’t overdo it! You need your pages to read well and naturally. Use that keyword phrase just enough and in the right places on your page. What are these places and why are them important? We’ll set out the high-power page positions just below. For now, know that these page positions are crucial signposts to Google that it is this phrase you’re optimizing for.

Our free tool for on-page optimisation

Before we give you the lowdown, you might want to take advantage of our free tool SEO Page Optimizer to determine if you’re using your keywords enough and in the best places on your page. You can make writing your page much simpler for Google if you’re pre-prepared with the right information by using our smart Google tool , SEO Page Optimizer. It’s a content analysis tool that we’ve developed ourselves. It’s intuitive to use and user-friendly and will help you make your content perfect for both Google and real people. It’s also totally free! SEO Page Optimizer will read your webpage SEO content in exactly the way that Google’s spiders do. A spider is a component of Google’s software that crawls the web in an orderly, automated manner. SEO Page Optimizer operates in the same way. The tool that will deliver you up your grades for each on-page component and improvement tips. It then highlights where you’re going wrong, what you’re doing right, and what you can do to make the page even better for your Google SEO. For every page you upload, you get a detailed report from us that you can follow to improve your website’s on-page SEO yourself. SEO Page Optimizer is free for one web page analysis every day for all our customers. Give it a try now for any page of your site to measure your content for its SEO strength!

5 strong reasons to use SEO Page Optimizer

It’s simple and fast to use.
You get one free analysis per day so you can move onto your next page the next day.
You’ll get a list of related keywords to avoid excessive use of the target keyword
You get step-by-step instructions on how to improve and tweak your page.
It covers every single on-page component from your alt-tag, to your meta-description, to your H1s and H2s, etc.

Try it for Google results. If you do need more analyzes than one per day, you can order them either singly or as a batch online.

Keyboost: the tool for valuable link juice

As we explained above, the other super-important SEO indicator for Google is backlinks. What are they? They’re the external links into your own website, known as backlinks, which come from other websites. Each one will impact your website’s online visibility and its SEO success. Incoming links are a signal of trust for Google and depending from where the links are coming, they can have a big impact on your SERP positions. The number and quality of your backlinks is important. They permit Google to measure the value of your content and how well seen it is by other website owners. The higher your volume of good quality backlinks, the better position Google will award you in its rankings on the search engine pages. Can you rank without any backlinks? This is a question we’re often asked. The answer is it’s not likely – it would be very difficult. External links are almost always a factor for the most high-performing sites. If you know you’ve a poor volume of backlinks, we can help you. We’ve a backlink sourcing service called Keyboost. It’s operated by our team of in-house technicians. We’re proud to say that our customers who use Keyboost typically secure a raise in their positions very quickly. Most ‘Keyboosters’ witness a significant hike in their SERPs ranking in just over three weeks. It’s our experience that if your site already has a position in the Google top 30 for your target keyword, with our help, you can generally secure a top 10 listing. Keyboost is a specialist service managed by our own technicians. To get going, we will ask you, via our online form, to set out your target keyword and the URL of the web page you would like to have boosted. For most people this is their home page, as it’s most websites’ primary ‘landing’ page. We will then do our homework to dig into your website subject area and your nearest competitors. Our research will focus on identifying those relevant and authority sites in your niche area from which it would help you to receive backlinks to increase your own website’s findability and performance. Our technicians guarantee to identify only genuine and strong backlink opportunities for you from relevant sites to yours that have page authority.We also add the links gradually. Google likes links to appear slowly. If your website gets a surge of links suddenly, this is against the ‘expected pattern’ and it would raise some flags. We take the same approach as with organic links.

Our Keyboost guarantee

As our assurance to you, we make available to each customer one free Keyboost test per website domain. There’s a proviso though. We can only offer this free test to those website owners whose webpage already has a top 100 position in Google for a given target keyword phrase. (In other words, if we were to type in your keyword, we would find your website appear within one of Google’s top 10 pages). When we’ve completed our backlink research and implemented your backlinks, we’ll notify you and then deliver your ranking uplift report within Google. You’ll also be able to check your SEO ranking increase yourself too within Google Search Console or simply by Googling and seeing where your webpage is now appearing in the SERPs. If you’re happy that your SERPs position has gained a convincing boost and you then feel you would benefit from further Keyboosts for other website pages, you can then request a quotation. Our costs are far cheaper and more effective than using paid-for methods such as PPC and Google Adwords. Test Keyboost’s Google effect now.

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Our expertise and experience

Our company is a full service digital marketing business. Our offices are located across Europe: in the Netherlands, France, Belgium and the UK. Our UK head office is situated in East Finchley, London. We offer a broad range of digital SEO services, including paid-for tactics such as SEM. We also provide an information resource bank and several free SEO tools for hands-on customers wanting to driving more traffic to their site. Our experienced digital team – yes, we’re a geeky bunch (!) but we’re also very human and personable – was established over 15 years ago. We’ve grown and learned our SEO knowledge apace with the development of the Internet. If you would like to contact us directly on any query, you can do that using the details on the page below or use our live chat facility. You can also call us at +44 3308 084797 or e-mail: info@seopageoptimizer.co.uk

10 easy tips for website success

Befuddling as all the updates Google makes to its algorithms are, here’s a surprising SEO truth. Google’s over-riding algorithmic factors have not changed significantly for many years. The fundamental signals that tell Google where to rank your may have been tweaked, but the fundamental pillars have not. These, as we said above, are 1) employing best practice for keyword usage and placement and 2) increasing your backlinks score. If you can also implement the advice that follows for Google, you’ll be doing everything SEO right!

1. Get blogging

Blogging is a very powerful means to:

Bring in online traffic.
Educate, built trust with and convert customers.
Keep your current customers engaged and interested.
Make you stand out you from other similar businesses.
Increase demand for your products or services.

The most solid piece of advice we can offer is to begin a blog on your website and to update it regularly. Every well-written blog page is another page online that will be indexed by Google. Produce high-quality keyword-rich content and you’ll soon see a SERPS uplift. Commit to blogging regularly – ideally twice a week. If you don’t have time to produce the content output yourself, you can outsource it to a website content creator who can either create you a content calendar with suggested blog topics to follow or write the content for you. Having a regular blog will bring you huge SEO value. If your content is valuable to your visitors, they’ll stay longer on your site – which will positively impact your bounce rates and immediately be noticed by Google. Google likes to see sites on which visitors want to linger. You might be interested to know, in regard to this, that it is the longer blog posts – of over 2,000 words – that tend to convert best! A blog also means you can target different versions of your long-tail keywords in a focused way – with far more freedom than you can on your main website pages and then drive visitors to your core pages with a call to action. You can also use these blog content articles to create internal links to keep Google’s spiders moving speedily around your site. Sites that demonstrate authority on a broad topic are more likely to provide an answer to a query and to be discovered by Google. But it’s not just your keyword performance you can increase by blogging. You can use it to build up your backlinks. Write good content and others will want to link to you. The more blog articles you output, the more opportunities you’ll have to win valuable backlinks. Another clever way to promote your blog content and build more links to boot is through guest posting. Many websites accept ‘guest posts’ from other authors and then permit the guest authors to enter their contact details at the bottom of the article (including links to their websites). You can repurpose your own good content and re-write it as a guest post for another website of authority. When visitors read your blog on your website and they find it useful, chances are they’ll want to share it. It’s a good idea to help them do that by having social media share buttons on your website or blog. Also always use images within your content so that when shared the image will go out with your post and add to its attractiveness. As with anything SEO, it’s a long-time process. So be patient, keep building up good blog content and the wins will come – in the shape of more visitors, more backlinks, higher rankings and more conversions!

2. Be strategic planning your site

Your website has to have a game plan. Every page must have a purpose in driving your visitors to what you want them ultimately to do. Primarily, it has the usually monetary goal you are building it for. This could be attracting customers to buy your products or persuading people to book a consult for your services. Next, it needs to entice and inform your visitors and reassure them what you’re offering is what they need. So put your user first as you lead him or her through your site. Each of your website pages should be part of your bigger game plan. Each page should be based around a target keyword phrase.

Work out the game plan for your website? How will the site help you achieve your business goals? Each page is a step towards making this happen and each one will need its own CTAs. It’ll help you to have these actions clear for what’s known as your ‘visitor flow’ well before you begin.
Identify your ideal customer and their demographics. Understanding your audience’s needs, wants and desires is crucial. .
Decide on your tone of voice so that you can tailor your content to them by what you write and the way in which you address them. If your audience is the middle-aged business sector then your language and vocabulary will be very different to that for a millennial audience.
Check out your competitors. Do you want to be a similar version or do you want to differentiate yourself somehow?

3. Decide the web features you need

These will be determined to a large extent by your website game plan and what you want your website to do. You might need email sign-up forms, calendars so that people can book a consult with you, e-commerce capabilities so that customers can buy your products or make an initial deposit to book you, and a way to capture leads. Don’t be afraid to take professional help, especially if you know you’ll need a CRM (Customer relationship management) system or automated email marketing software.

4. Structure your on-page content

Here we’ll set out the places on your webpage that you should focus your keyword usage on for best effect in Google.

Title tag: Write this within 70 characters as per Google’s guidelines. Put your keywords first to signal to Google as to the main subject of your site. So in our example above, you might use Stress relief acupunturist | Anxiety help, Kent. If you have space, you could also include your company name. But make the keywords your priority because your company name will probably be used in the url that will appear above your title tag in the search results. Making use of the keyword in your title tag is fundamental and will improve your SERPs results.
Meta description: This is the snippet that summarizes your page and that pops up below your result in Google. This is your chance to encourage people to click through and you should write this as a small promotional text for your page and write it well. As ever, include relevant keywords to reassure visitors they are in the right place. What’s the best length for high-performing Google SEO? Aim for around 155 characters. However Google has begun showing more of these snippets for mobile users. So our advice is to write a meta description that works well at 155 characters, with a second line that will take it up to 300 characters. Make sure your first 155 character line makes sense when it stands alone. For our acupuncturist business example above, you might use: ‘Professional, trusted & fully accredited acupuncturist, over 12 years experience in Kent area, specializing in anxiety issues, followed by a second line such as: ‘Acupuncture for anxiety disorders such as panic attacks, insomnia, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).’
Body: By this we mean the content that is not a headline, but the main text on your page. Don’t overdo usage of your keyword phrase. Certainly you should use it but it’s a good practice to also mix in synonyms and similar and related words . A good tip is to also use qualifiers such as ‘cheapest’, ‘easiest’, ‘best’ and ‘most affordable’, for example.
Headings and sub-heads (h1 and h2 etc): Headings are powerful signposts with the crawlers and they pay special attention to them as they see these headings as the broad outline of your page. Headings are usually labelled with h1 to h6 tags – so a h1 tag will be seen as more important to Google than a h6. These are important on-page places for your target keywords so don’t fail to use them!
ALT tags: This is the description you provide for any images you include. This tag is a small but important indicator to the bots. It’s wise to use images to make your site bright and attractive. Use your keywords when you can in these tags as it’s another signpost to Google what your site is all about. Don’t overstuff your keywords however – use them where they make sense.
Anchor text: This are the words you choose to link to another place on your own website or to another site. It’s a hyperlink from words you choose. You can use anchor text as it’s a way to assist algorithmic crawlers to travel around your site. This is a clever and easy tactic. It’s more effective not to use a generic anchor like ‘click here’ or ‘buy now’ but to employ your keywords. For example: ‘Discover our acupuncture tips for anxiety’.

5. Avoid ‘shared’ web hosting

Cheap hosting providers might seem a good idea but the fact is you’ll lose time, money and visibility by going down this route. Secure web hosting is a fundamental of web performance. The main difference between a shared host and an individual one is that shared hosting is cheaper but your website is hosted on the same server with manyother websites all sharing the same resources. It’s much better to use your own Virtual Private Server (VPS). This means your website is hosted on its own IP, on a virtual server that has dedicated resources. The quality of your web host will decide how accessible your website actually is. Ideally choose one that is located in your own country as Google would rather direct a searcher to a relevant site in the UK than the US if your host is UK-based. If your web host is not top-notch, the more frequently your website will be down and this down-time may negatively affect your rankings. Let’s face it, if your website is up and available all of the time, it’s more likely Google will deliver it up in relevant searches. So it’s worth investing in. The quality of your web host will also be a factor in your site loading time. Of course you can influence some of the elements affecting the speed of your website, such as coding and image file sizes etc, but your site load time will also be down to your web host. Be aware that the quicker your page loads, the better it will be for your website performance too as page speed is now an important Google ranking factor. There’s a direct correlation between Google rankings and page speed. Most websites on the first places on Google’s places typically load in less than 2 seconds. Want to see how your web pages are performing for speed. Google now makes it easy for you to test it out with this simple tool.

6. Measure, measure, measure

Don’t assume it’s a case of build it and they will come! This is why Google Analytics is a really useful tool for website owners. It’s free to use and enables you to study your web traffic for real insights that you can put into play to improve your site. The metrics will reveal for you:</></>

Where your visitors came from
Which geographical area brings in the most customers
Your site’s most popular entry points
Your referral sources such as linked content or social media that brought them to your site
What terms are bringing in most traffic
Why and where visitors might be bouncing off your site
Your goal and conversion rates. Google Analytics allows you to set up goals to track when a user completes a desired action on your site.
Which devices your users are coming from so you’ll be able to see how well your mobile site is working in comparison to the desktop version.

If you haven’t already, then sign up an account at Google Analytics for free and Google Search Console .

7. Get link-worthy

Have you heard of PageRank? Your website will have one. It’s a number scored out of 10 that Google awards your website based on the number of inbound and outbound links. It indicates how trustworthy your site is. Linking between sites means ‘link juice’ is transferred. So your goal should be to produced the kind of content that will attract links from sites with a good PageRank themselves. This, in turn, will improve your ranking. A quality link is one that is coming from a related website to your niche area and that is is trusted by Google. Natural link building is what happens when a website owner deliberately adds a link to their website that points to your website because they believe the content on yours will enhance their visitors’ experience and knowledge. They give you the link because helps their own users. It takes time and effort to win backlinks to your site and see the results for your website in the SERPs. Do make sure that your site is linked to from your social media platforms as Google does take note of social media signals. A quick win can be to get listed on free open directories or professional bodies associated with your business area. Whenever you publish content such as a blog, put it ‘out there’ using your social media channels such as Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. The more people can see your blog content, the more likely they will want to backlink to you to share your strong content with their own visitors. This will have a positive effect on your website’s SEO. Remember that both outbound and internal links are crucial. Do make the effort to link out to other websites in your niche area. If you’re linking to other relevant sites, it underlines for Google that yours is a serious site in its focus area. Do also feel free to approach other website owners and ask them to link to your website. Remember you can use our free Keyboost tool to source relevant backlinks for better Google SEO You can improve your SEO with our free Keyboost trial. Most users see a SERPs ranking improvement in under a month. To get underway, we ask you, via our online form you fill in, for your target keyword and URL. Then we research your website and its niche area. We’ll then source the best websies from which to place backlinks that are in a related area to yours. To prove it actually works, we provide you with one free Keyboost test per domain. This offer is valid as long as your webpage has a top 100 position in Google for your target keyword. You can trial Keyboost by clicking here.

8. Optimize your site structure

Your site’s architecture – in other words, how it’s designed so that visitors can move from one page to the next – can have a major effect on the way your site works for both search bots and your visitors. The easier you can make it for your visitors to find your content, the longer they’ll spend reading your site – and the more likely they are to take your desired actions such as sign up for a newsletter, book a consult or buy your product. You can use a wireframe to help you do this. This is a simple representation of the content and navigation for a page on your site. Your goal is to ensure your site is visible, or readable, by search spiders. A website with a strong logical structure will naturally guide a user to the information and on-site actions you want your users to take. Have you heard of the ‘Three-Click Rule’? It’s a design concept that advises that visitors should be able to find what they’re looking for in approximately three mouse clicks upon landing on your website. It’s a good one to follow – so keep your site structure simple. Another helpful site structure element for UX (user experience) is to provide what are known as breadcrumbs. A breadcrumb is a simple menu of internal links located at the top or bottom of the page. It’s helpful because it allows users to quickly jump around and navigate your website and get a sense of how ‘deep’ they are from the home page or main section page. It’s also used by search crawlers to orientate themselves and understand about the structure of your website as their bots undergo their crawling.

9. Be strategic with keyword use

Every page on your site is an opportunity to show up on Google’s results so make that page work hard for you. Be specific and choose a long-tail keyword that is the main reason for that page. Being specific will make that page more findable by search engine and visitors. Don’t repeat that long-tail keyword unnecessarily but use it on the on-page positions we indicated to you above and then use plenty of related words and synonyms that make sense as you write natural content about your subject matter.

10. Make your site is responsive

There are more mobile users than ever before. Google has now announced that it is now ranking on the basis of ‘mobile-first’. Google’s spiders actually now treat the mobile pages of a website as the primary page to index. It used to be the desktop version but not any more. So make sure if you’re getting a new website that your web pages are responsive and adapt themselves in response to the size of the screen they are being viewed on. You can test your site’s responsiveness very simply with a free tool from Google. Here’s the statement from the Official Google Webmaster Blog: “To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results. Of course, while our index will be built from mobile documents, we’re going to continue to build a great search experience for all users, whether they come from mobile or desktop devices.” So basically this means that that if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you can expect to appear lower on the results pages. And yes, that’s even for desktop too. Click here then simply enter your website’s URL into the ‘Enter web page URL’ bar and click analyse.

Are your keywords in the right places?

We can help you with our free on-page analysis tool. Would you like to run your own webpages through our tool to determine their keyword effectiveness for Google ranking? We make available one free webpage Google analysis per day of our in-house tool, SEO Page Optimizer. It returns to you a full analysis and informs you what to tweak in your page content to achieve a Google top 10 ranking. Try our Google tool now, SEO Page Optimizer. Click and you’ll be taken to our online form where to type in the target keywords and URL of your page. The data that the report gives you will make it clear how you should re-position these keywords. It also provides a list of related words and synonyms you can use to boost your ratings with Google. You’ll get step-by-step instructions on what to do. Click here for your free Google webpage analysis and get your keywords and Google optimization performance right. Request your free analysis and quote now. Email us at info@seopageoptimizer.co.uk or call us at +44 3308 084797.

Our website tools

Your page content and your link profile are the backbone of your website. So take advantage of the free tools we offer to improve these aspects of your site for Google. A clever online SEO Google tool to help with your content creation: SEO Page Optimizer. To get your personalized report on your web page content, you simply fill in your page URL and your target phrase into the online form. This page sleuth then scans your copy and compares it to the top 10 pages in Google for that target keyword. It then directs you as to how to reformat your text. It provides specific guidance as to how to re-word your content and re-position your keywords so that it’s better optimized for the Google engine. Importantly it also provides you with related keywords. These are the synonyms, variations and semantically related phrases that you can use to bolster your content and not over-use your target keyword. Give it a try now for free and discover how easy it is to use SEO Page Optimizer. Your on-page content will be optimized for maximum SEO effect. 5 BENEFITS OF SEO PAGE OPTIMIZER

It does all the heavy lifting for you in terms of your keyword placement.
It provides you with a personalized list of recommendations for the structure of your content.
It delivers a list of related keywords that are actually current within Google. You can then pick and choose from the list of synonyms to avoid excessive use of the keyword
It allows you to do all this quickly and to see the benefit of a rise in the SERPs as soon as your page is re-indexed by Google.
It produces an easy-to-follow list of action items to maximize the results of your content, covering every on-page requirement, from your alt-tag, to your meta-description, to your H1s and H2s, etc.
It has no charge. We make available on free analysis per day.

To find out more or to try it out, simply click here. If you need more analyzes than one per day, they are not expensive and you can easily order these online.

Advanced website tips

1. Get HTTPS

For ultimate performance value with Google, your website needs to be https. If you have an e-commerce store or gather any user information this is a must but even in cases where you have a straightforward site, it is good to have SSL enabled. When you visit a website, your computer and the web server communicate using a protocol known as HTTP. This is short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. HTTP is now assumed to have weaknesses however that are important to recognize. The main one is security because the information passing between your computer and the website is not encrypted and so is vulnerable to hackers. Google has said often that having an SSL website gives you a small advantage in rankings. Google actually began using HTTPS as a ranking signal in 2014. This factor will certainly gain more importance in the years. You can arrange your HTTPS with the purchase and installation of a professionally signed security certificate, and you’ll be best advised to go to a web development company to achieve this.

2. Content formatting

Subheadings are good for SEO and also useful for people who skim read when they look at your web page, which frankly, is what most of us do. Research has shown that on average a visitor will only read 20% of the content on your page! So make it easy for them so that at a glance they can understand what it covers simply by reading your headings. It’s a good idea to approach the structure of your page rather as you go about a table of contents for a book. Each H1 or main page title is your book chapter title and the subheadings of the page are the chapter contents in summary. For SEO, the page title should have the H1 tag – make sure you only have one H1 per page or you will confuse the search engines. Tthe subheadings will then cascade down as H2 or H3 down to H6. On top of subheads, think of all the other formatting means at your disposal to make the content on your page stand out. Elements such as bold text, italics and small paragraphs help to set sections of text apart and draw the eye to them. It’s also important for the search engine crawlers. They will give greater precedence to the text sections that in bold or italics. All this said and done, do it for your visitors first! User experience should be where you concentrate your formatting energies.

3. Google ‘featured snippet’

A ‘featured snippet box’ is a relatively new feature introduced by Google to help searchers obtain an immediate answer to a question or query without having to actually search within any website. Featured Snippets tend to appear in search when there is one direct answer for a question or a set of instructions to follow. Securing a featured snippet is a big win in terms of SEO because it will massively increase your website’s click-through-rate. And the big marketing advantage is that if your website can answer the particular question well and succinctly, Google will show your answer in the featured snippet over and above a more powerful website regardless of its domain authority. Tiny companies that do this optimisation well are even giving big brands a run for their SEO money! Try it now to see how it works. Type in a question now for which you want an answer. Try ‘does acupuncture work’ and you’ll see, if you’re in the UK, you get an immediate answer at the top of the page from livescience.com. Type in ‘does acupuncture work for anxiety’ and you get another answer snippet, this time from another company. What are the chances of someone looking for acupuncture help with anxiety clicking through? Very high! So depending on your website’s area of expertise, try including answers to likely queries in your content. Google chooses its featured snippets by searching the web and selecting a paragraph of text from the most relevant web page’s content that gives a succinct response to the answer. Another clever way to boost your chances of getting a featured snippet is by actually giving straightforward answers to the real questions people ask on Google. Type in a query that you think people might be asking about your field of expertise. For example, if you type in: “Does acupuncture work for anxiety?”, and you scroll down the page you’ll come to Google’s section ‘People Also Ask’. Here you’ll find related questions you could seek to answer in your own content such as “What does acupuncture do for anxiety?”; “Can acupuncture help with anxiety and insomnia?”; “Can acupuncture help with hair loss?” and “How long does acupuncture last?” These type of real queries are ideal material for you to use and secure a featured snippet. A couple of tips are to provide the answer in a short paragraph near the top of your webpage and to include an image with the alt-tag using the relevant keywords in the query.

4. Mobile performance

Mobile SEO is slightly different to normal SEO. Google will be checking for all of the following:

Your page layout. Is your web page responsive and will all the elements render properly on mobile without the user having to scroll left or right?
Accessibility. Size of buttons, text and images should be large enough to see and swipe and be easy to use without the user having to go to the trouble of zooming in or out.
Speed. How fast does it load and is the page slowed down by slow-loading heavy images?
Location. When a user searches away from home on mobile, he or she will get different results to those he or she would get at him on their desktop. Google knows exactly where you are and the results are tailored to where you are.

You can easily check your website’s mobile performance here.

5. Social proof

Social proof – or testimonials and reviews – are a big SEO factor in helping a website build trust and convert its visitors. Testimonials underline your credibility and trust. This is why websites such as Tripadvisor are so successful. People want to read other people’s genuine experiences and opinions. Increasing your number of reviews or testimonials can definitely lead to higher conversion rates. There are many ways to get reviews from customers. The quickest way is to email them when they’re still in the ‘honeymoon period’ when they’re satisfied after a purchase or after using your services and asking them for their feedback. Remember that your new customers are much more likely to believe your existing customers than any glowing words you write about yourself. They’ll talk like ‘normal’ people too. You can make this easy for them by sending them a short survey of up to five questions to answer so they don’t have to think too much. If you have worked for other companies, ask them too if you can display their logo on your own website as social proof. Then share this social proof across your website. You can have a dedicated reviews or testimonials page and you can also sprinkle relevant testimonials across your site. Do they have a SEO value? Yes they do and notably if you link to your client’s high authority website when you publish his review. Many experts also say that Google can even judge the strength of a review based on the actions and history of the person that left the review! But there are three other reasons why testimonials will boost your ratings with Google:

Testimonials are a source of fresh, ever-changing, and relevant content.
Testimonials indicate to search engines that real customers are interacting with your business.
Testimonials usually contain long-tail keywords that your type of customers are actually searching for.

6. Optimize buttons

While you may not consider your call-to-action buttons a major factor for Google, you’d be surprised at their optimization and conversion impact. Your visitors cannot convert online without clicking a button. This means your call to action, usually a button, can make your visitors act or not act. So don’t just say ‘download now’, ‘buy now’ or ‘read now’ but be more ambitious. What’s wrong with these bland call to actions? All of the following:

They don’t suggest or speak to the value of taking an action.
They don’t reflect the visitor’s motivation or goal.
They imply work without giving a reason why the work is worth it.

So instead of ‘download now’ in the case of a White Paper, say: ‘Get the expert advice on xxxx now’. Instead of ‘buy now’, label your button: ‘I want the xxxxx product now’ and instead of ‘read now’, use: ‘Discover the truth of xxxx now’.

7. Writing headlines

You know the importance of including your keyword phrase in your H1. But there’s another reason to spend time crafting it. Your headline will impact whether people read onto the next line. It will be the deciding factor whether people click on your call to action or not. A well-written headline will affect bounce, engagement, clicks and overall conversion. Ideally it will match your visitors’ expectations and intrigue them enough to move on down your page. Then follow with the same process with your subheadings. The subhead also has to work hard for your page. It has to hold their attention, build on your first compelling headline, and encourage them to keep reading down the page towards your well-written call to action.

8. SEO through email marketing

Once your website is performing well, you can encourage more visitors and boost your online visibility through email marketing. If you don’t know what email marketing involves, you are new to email marketing, the best way to understand the purpose of it, is to review the definition given by Wikipedia: “Email marketing is directly sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. Broadly, the term is usually used to refer to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately.” Email marketing is hugely effective but it involves your building up a list of willing recipients first. Most websites do this by offering them something of value – a guide or a white paper – in return for an opt-in to their mailing list. Note that in the UK, following the introduction of GDPR, you’ll require a double opt-in to do this now. Once you’re in touch with them, you can drive them back to your website to a landing page or main page as traffic to help boost both your online performance and your conversion rates. A few tips on email marketing:

Make it easy for your visitors to sign up with you. Don’t demand heaps of information at this stage since people are already in a hurry. They’ll be more willing to just type their email address instead of giving you their name or telephone number.
Use social media advertising such as Facebook to encourage subscribers. You can then provide a link that will send them to land on a page that is optimized for collecting email subscribers.

9. Tick all these 11 boxes!

1. Get to know as much as you can about the niche area of your business or service. Research your competitors, the thought-leaders and do your keyword research carefully so that you can optimize each page for a solid keyword phrase. 2. Deliver up good valuable and engaging content for the topics you choose. If you are not an expert, or are not a natural writer, outsource it and hire people that are experts at writing in your subject area. 3. Expect to invest on your website. This could be outsourcing your content creation, paying for PPC such as AdWords or Facebook advertising, or using a consultant to help you improve your copywriting, your conversion rates or your user experience. See it as an initial investment that will be worth the ROI eventually. 4. Be creative in the ways in which you engage your audience and be generous with your knowledge. Offer them free tools or e-books to keep them coming back. 5. Make full use of email marketing because it works. Work hard to grow your email list. 6. Go all out on other promotion methods. Your organic SEO via keyword-rich content and attracting backlinks is fundamental. But other methods such as Facebook advertising are very effective and will also boost your SEO. 7. Use social media promotion fully. You’ll get more traffic flowing into your site. 8. Make your mobile performance a priority. Don’t just hope for the best. Get it right from the start, be it the size of your buttons to your page speed. 9. Aim to build high-quality links from trusted and relevant sites. Prioritize quality over quantity. 10. Be patient. It takes time for SEO to work. Keep doing your work and results will come. 11. Be consistent about pushing blog content out. Set yourself a publishing schedule and a content calendar or work with someone who will do this for you. It has been proven that those who blog regularly see a big SEO difference compared to those who blog sporadically!

Recap: on-page checklist

When Google or any other search engine crawls your pages to determine what they’re covering, you can make it easy for them to understand what the page is about. This is by placing keywords into the pages, in exactly right pages. So let’s recap on the fundamental on-page search engine optimization tactics for your web pages. In our example, you’re targeting the phrase ‘acupuncture for anxiety’. Here’s our advice for where you should use this keyword phrase.

The page’s URL is your starting point and an instant indicator to Google. Use keywords in it. Never fail to use this opportunity. You might end up with a URL such as this: http://www.yourdomain.com/acupuncture-for-anxiety
The page’s TITLE tags are also vital to take full advantage of. You should make sure you include keywords, like this: Acupuncture for anxiety | How to use acupuncture therapy to control anxiety and depression
The meta description tag should be your next point of focus. It doesn’t fall within one of Google’s algorithmic indicators and won’t actually affect your search-results placement – at least so Google says it doesn’t use the tag to help rank your page but not all experts are convinced this is true. Whether it is true or not, what is certain is that the meta description will usually be shown on the search engine results page. So you should still pay attention to your keyword use within it and write it in a compelling manner so that it’s effectively a ‘min-advertisement’ for your page. It should be written to entice searchers to click your link rather than that of another website above or below yours. For instance: your META NAME (which is how the meta description is set out in HTML) might be “Are you struggling with anxiety. There’s a growing body of research that shows that acupuncture can help treat this condition that affects everyone from time to time. Discover our services.”
Your next big focus is the headings on your pages. They should unquestionably contain your keywords and synonyms of them. They should also be formatted in a way that indicates to the search engines that they are headings. That means using the H tags. Use an H1 tag at the top for your main heading, then use H2 and H3 tags lower on the page and you can cascade down to H6.
Then turn your attention to your images. You should use keywords both in your image file names and in the image tag’s actual ALT text. So don’t just upload a file and leave it as 43332-0.jpg. Rename it appropriately. For instance: “anxiety-control-by-acupuncture.jpg” and make your ALT tag something such as “Acupuncture use for anxiety demonstration”. You can use your images as links to other pages too. When you do this, using ALT text is doubly important as it shows the search engines what the referenced page is about.
This brings us to anchor text – the text that links to another page on your own site or to one outside it. Search engines pay special attention to reading the anchor text in your links to assess what the page the link points to is about. So do use lots of links in your site, with strong keywords in those links.
As for your body text – your main content on the page outside the headings – then keep using your keywords naturally. Use synonyms and related words too. All of this helps Google understand the context of your page. But keep it natural. If you want a page to rank well for ‘acupuncture for anxiety’, then the phrase, or versions of it, should also be used a few times throughout the body text. If it sounds awkward when you read it back, re-do it. The chances are you may have tried to use the keywords too many times.
Also don’t forget the other ways to draw attention to keywords in your body text with formatting. You can make them bold; put them in bulleted lists, make them italic, use uppercase.
Have you used the keywords in the URL?
Have you used the keywords in the TITLE tags?
Have you used the keywords in the DESCRIPTION meta tag?
Have you used the keywords in at least the page’s first H1 tag?
Have you used the keywords in the subheadings?
Have you used the keywords several times in the body content of the page?
Have you used the keywords in the anchor text, ie. links, pointing to elsewhere in your site or to another site externally?

Ten tips for blog writing for SEO

How you write your blog posts will depend on the subject and the angle you want to take. Whatever you’re writing and whatever the style you choose, make the post about your reader. Blog posts should never be a hard sell for your company. While they serve the purpose of marketing, it should be in an educational sense. And if you’re feeling stumped about how to go about covering a topic, here are some ideas to help you choose the right format for best SEO.

How-To Post

This is a good format for you to show off your expertise in your niche area. You can make good use of how-to posts when you want to inform your visitors about how to do or use something. You can set these out in the step-by-step format or with sub-heads. Either way, the how to is a great SEO opportunity to get plenty keyword-rich information into content on your site. Don’t forget you can also use infographics or even a short video within it to boost its shareability and appeal to visitors. If you do use a video, don’t forget to add the transcript below so that Google can ‘see’ the video too.

News-Jacking Post

This is a post that uses as its angle some item of news that has a direct relevance to your topic area. You can simply report the news in your own words or give your take on it and perhaps link it to your own business, To stay abreast of news in your field, set yourself up with a Google alert for your keyword term so you’ll be the first to know when there’s a relevant news story to use as your ‘hook’. News-jacking posts are not only good because they’re current; they also show to your visitors that you’re at the forefront of your field. They’ll make you look knowledgeable and informative. They’re also a great reason to link out to the original source – which, if it’s a trusted news outlet, will help you look good in Google’s eyes and boost your ratings.

List Post

This is a format that lends itself to all kinds of topics and angles. Your title would be along the lines of ’10 ways to do xxxx” or “21 solutions to xxxx problem” or “3 foolproof ways to do xxxx”. Actually, many marketers believe that the odd-numbered list is the most successful and seen as likely to be the most valuable. Why is this? Because when it’s top 10 or top 20, we tend to think the piece has been fleshed out to 10 or to 20 rather than being dictated by the truth! But list posts work well with Google because people like to receive information that’s ordered. When you see a list post, you know immediately that it’s going to be logical and succinct.

Thought Leadership Post

This is basically an opinion piece. So if you’re knowledgeable in your field, it’s your chance to show off your industry knowledge and insight. This kind of piece is often speculative and thought provoking and that’s what they should be. It’s good practices to reference other informative sources and research in your topic area.

FAQ Post

This type of post is rather like the How–to post but in this case you’ll give answers to the kind of questions you think your visitors might be interested to know more on. Titles might by “Your questions answered on xxxx” or “Answers to the 9 most asked questions on xxxx”. These posts are effective for addressing common questions your visitors are likely to have, grouped under a specific topic, with lots of keyword potential for Google.

Interview Post

This one is what it says. Reach out to an expert in your niche and interview them and publish the post as a question and answer article. Ask questions that are likely to have a relevance to your visitors. This kind of post is good for authority building and also for relationship-building. You can title this one in this way for example: “Straight talk with xxxx industry expert xxxx on the importance of xxxx” or “Industry guru xxxx gives her predictions for the future of xxxx”.

Curated Post

This is when you gather together a list of useful articles or sources that will be of interest to your visitors. They take some time to research and put together but you’ll be providing your visitor base with an easy resource that they can use. These also give you the opportunity to underline to Google what your niche area of expertise is as it will note all the websites that you are linking out to. Titles would be along the line of “Best of xxxx” or “The ultimate round-up of xxx”.

Case Study Post

If you are a business, using case studies of your completed work projects with clients can make a worthwhile post. It gives you a chance to showcase your past work and breadth of expertise. You should, of course, obtain the permission of your clients before you use the information but most will be pleased with the coverage and links to their own site. You can choose whether to cover your work for a single client or to cover that for several clients under a common theme.

Slideshare or Video Post

If you’ve written a good post, you could re-purpose it as a Slideshare or video post in this more visual and interactive style of content. You may need to include graphs, charts and research data. Slideshare and video allows you to be more concise and condensed in your content in an educational way. This kind of visual format is also great content to be shared on your social media channels.

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