Just a little while ago I finished hosting a webinar for my students. I am a teacher of internet marketing tactics and I help people to create a side or full time income from their computer. Tonight I hosted the event and Susanne Myers spoke. Susanne is an SEO expert and she had some great things to teach us. I am going to list out three of the things that she taught us about getting your sites ranked highly by Google.
The first thing to consider in creating sites that are ranked highly by the search engines are the on page factors. Things like making sure your keyword phrase is found in your title tag, early in the title, and meta description. Once you have it in those places you need to also make sure it is in the first 100 words of your content and if possible BOLD it by using the bold tags. One thing you want to stay away from though is keyword stuffing. Make sure the keywords you use are placed in your content in a natural way. Finally make the keyword phrase a part of your URL.
After you consider the on page factors you need to keep in mind the off page factors. For instance you need to do some internal linking from pages within your site. When you do this you need to use anchor text that is the keyword phrase that you are optimizing for. Anchor text is the text that is highlighted when you click on a link. For instance below this article you will see anchor text that will link you to more information about me.
Finally we need to consider the backlinks that are coming in to your site. Backlinks are links from another site to your site. In the early days of the internet before the search engines these links were the only ways to get around/surf the internet. Backlinks are like votes to the search engines, the more you have the better your site will rank. You can get backlinks by posting meaningful comments on people’s blogs, by being an active member of a forum and occasionally linking to content that will answer people’s questions, and by guest blogging (basically blogging on someone else’s platform with their permission.
This was an amazing webinar. If you are a member of my monthly program you will be able to catch the replay of this if you missed it. If you have questions about SEO please comment about them below. Susanne has promised to come here to this blog and answer your questions.
So go ahead and post your SEO or Google page ranking questions now for Susanne and I.
Alright let’s kick this off…I am ready to hear some good questions from everyone for Susanne. My first question for her is:
What is the most effective way to get people to want to link to your site (give you backlinks)?
Jason C. Maxwell
Here is one I’ve wondered about, Jason & Susanne: One of the methods Susanne highlighted is to get backlinks from other sites and leaving meaningful comments on other people’s blogs. How do you know if they link back to your site? Thanks!
Hi Yvonne,
When you leave a comment, like you did just now on Jason’s blog, you usually have the option to enter your website URL. Once the comment is approved, you can hover over your name (or click on it) to make sure they are linking to you.
Hi Jason, That was one of the Best Webinars I have attended this year.
Susanne, thanks for sharing all that information.
Here’s my question> I have a lot of mini sites as well as my main site. Does it help with Google “juice” if I go in the link area of each site and link it to all the other sites, or because they are sub sites of my main site would it just be a waste of time?
Thanks for going “the extra mile” by coming back to answer our questions.
Hi William … inter linking your sites can be a little tricky, it can work, but Google is pretty good at “sniffing out” linking just for the sake of boosting rankings.
I definitely wouldn’t recommend linking them all together, but if they are all in the same overall niche, you could link from your main site to each mini site. If they are not related (i.e one is a dog training blog and the other a crockpot one) I woudn’t link them together at all.
It also helps to have the sites on different IP addresses. The easiest way to insure that is to use completely different hosting companies.
And thanks so much for the awesome compliment… you made my day!
Hi Jason, thanks again for having me on the call last night. It was a lot of fun.
The best way to get people to link to your site is to post lots of helpful, quality content and then start getting the word out about it (by being active on social media, forums, other blogs etc.) People won’t link to something if they don’t know it’s there.
You can also create specific pieces of content that act as a “link magnet”. Those are also sometimes called “Link Bait”. They are again good content that people will likely link to. Lists of resources work really well for this.
For example, if my site was about article marketing, I could create a resource list of my favorite article directories along with information on where to sign up, what their guidelines are for things like minimum word count of articles, how long it takes to get an article approved etc.
I have a question about backlinks from forums. Do the backlinks come from the the links in your signature?
Also, is it redundant to use H1 tags in the page title?
And does using h2 tags at the beginning of your page text make a difference?
Thanks Jason and Susanne!
Celene
Great questions Celene!
Let me go grab another cup of coffee before I answer …. ok, I’m back
Regarding your question about the forum signature, it depends. Some forums have the links set to “nofollow”, some don’t. I honestly don’t worry about it because my participation on a forum will still send me traffic and all the posts I’m writing link back to my profile page, making it stronger, which in turn makes the link back to my site stronger.
If you’re using WordPress to run your site, your title is already an H1 Tag. I prefer not to use H1 tags in content on my posts, but use h2 on occasion instead. It helps quite a bit if you can put it where it makes sense. If not, just try to bold your keyword one time within the post and you should be good.
I have read that as well as “bolding” your keyword in a blog post, you can also put one of them in italics and a third one underlined. I have also read that it is good to include an image with an alt text that is the keyword of your blog post. What about having sub headings that are formatted as H1, 2 etc.
Is this correct – or does it confuse the search engines?
If you use the wordpress seo plugin by yoast – is it necessary to use all of the above strategies ? ie are these strategies not incorporated in how that plugin works?
Thanks for the informative webinar, I learned a great deal!
Moira
Hi Moira,
Great points… yes, italics works as well and has almost as much of an input as bolding. From the testing I’ve done, underlining does not seem to affect rankings much.
Yes, including an image alt tag will help a little… if you’re going through the trouble of adding an image, make sure you fill out the alt tag info as well.
Sub headings definitely help, they actually have a bigger impact than bold tags. The nice thing about using WordPress is that it automatically adds the title of your blog post with an H1 tag. Make sure you use your keyword in your title and that part is taken care of.
Using all of these does not confuse the search engines, just make sure you use the same keyword (or a close variation of it) throughout the page. For example, if your keyword is “blue widget”, use that exact phrase or things like “best blue widget”, “buy blue widget” etc. throughout your content, tags, alt tags etc.
Jason, do you want to comment on the wordpress seo plugin by yoast? I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet.
Sure thing!
Yes all these ideas are worked into the WordPress SEO By Yoast plugin. In fact once you put in the focus keyword and move out of that field you will see all these areas in a list in either green or red. If they are in green that means you have included the focus keyword is in those areas. It will even tell you how many times it is in that area. Sometimes it will show red when you actually have the keyword in that area. If this happens just click save as draft and it will light up green. When all your areas are lit up as green you are ready to submit the article.
Jason
What is the deal about placing your keywords in bold or italics? I never heard that before. Does that help your SEO ranking?
Hi Carol, yes it does. It’s just another way to indicate to both your readers and the search engines that that’s an important term in the post or article you’re writing.
Pingback: Want To See My To-Do List?
Hi Susanne,
My question has to do with keyword search. You mentioned that you like long tail keywords. If what you want isn’t available, is it a good technique to combine two keyword results into one for the new domain name?
Thanks, Jill
Thanks for answering my question and doing this Q & A session, Susanne. Jason, thanks for making this opportunity available. Having others ask questions and reading Susanne’s answers is a great way to learn more
I\’d been extremely pleased to discover this internet-site.I need to to be able to thanks a lot in your occasion for this wonderful find out!! We positively enjoying any very little tiny amount of them as well as I anyone saved for taking a short look at brand-new things you weblog article.