We’ve seen a few practices in Ambler PA SEO that we just don’t agree with. To give some context, SEO is the acronym which means search engine optimization. SEO is a relatively new phenomenon in the world of marketing. Before service like Google, Bing, and Yahoo existed companies would try to build brand awareness on things like TV, radio, or billboards. Gone are the days where those physical mediums are enough to succeed in business, almost all of them now pale in comparison to the behemoths that are search engines. Modern marketing problems require modern solutions. Which is why your friends here at Caveni have a few tips to help you out with some of your SEO basics, specifically on ranking factors for your content. There are over two hundred confirmed ranking factors that we know exist, and many individuals postulate that there are really closer to four hundred that we are not totally aware of. We’ve listed a few of the most basic and easily executed, these are just a few to give your content that kick start that will help you rank over the competition. A few small changes and you will see a lot of traction against companies that are not optimizing their website content.
Simple On-Page SEO Factors
On page SEO comes in many forms, from website structure to the formatting of your blog posting and pages. When it comes to the content you create there are three things that you need to be aware of. The first is how to properly interlink your content with what SEOs call internal links. Internal links are when you use the keywords from your previous content to link to other relevant blogs on your website. For example I recently wrote an article on creating free SEO content based off of what we saw happening in NJ SEO . The same principles from our previous blog will apply in Ambler PA SEO as well. By linking to that blog in our content, it displays to google the internal relevancy of those keywords to our website. We are painting a larger picture with all of our website content, we want Google to have a very clear and obvious picture of what our website is about.
External Links are the next thing on your checklist. Linking internally is pretty straightforward, you are helping out your own content by sending people to it. External linking is where I see a lot of hangup from our clients, they don’t understand why they would encourage people to leave their website and read something else. You want to be linking out to reputable, high domain authority locations that are pointedly relevant to the topic you are writing about. Some of my favorite ways to do this are using pictures from those places that have some sort of relevance to the article being written. We will use items such an graphics or charts that provide context to our content. But, you can do the linking in the body of your text as well, and we encourage you to do a bit of both. Try to find links relevant to the content you are providing, since we are talking about external links, we might link to another website that discusses the importance of external links.
The more advanced step in this process is tagging, this will be the most difficult for someone who has very little experience in editing the SEO tags for their web page. If you are a developer or already work with one you can just add new meta descriptions relevant to your content. If you are using WordPress, this becomes infinitely easier. With WordPress it is as simple as adding in the Yoast SEO plugin and activating it. Once activated you can go to the “edit page” section in the WordPress dashboard and scroll down to the section where it talks about the meta description. This is the place where you want to describe your article or blog post using your desired keyword. If your unsure what keyword to use you can visit my blog on creating free SEO content, it covers some of the best ways to do keyword research.
Image Optimization for SEO
While Image Optimization is technically part of your on page and content creation, it is specific enough that it needs its own section in this blog. We’ve written about the “what” of choosing and optimizing images for your website, but not about the why. Image relevancy is a pretty recent addition and is not quite perfect to the point where Google can directly distinguish images, so they need a little help in the form of alt-text. Alt-text is a great way to give a brief description of the image and the reasons why it is relevant to your content, it is generally accepted as best practice to include your target keyword in the alt-text as well. If you are sourcing the image from somewhere else you should give them a link in the alt-text so that Google knows you didn’t steal it! By providing descriptions on your images you are also making it easier for people with disabilities to use your website, it’s a win-win!
Sourced images are one of my favorite was of creating external links in my posts, they will do a lot of good because everyone loves graphs and representation, plus it will fill your quotas for making sure you have images to keep your readers and Google engaged. Interlinking to those images is another easy way to internally link, but is something that we only recommend sparsely.
Simple Off-Page SEO Factors
Off page SEO is a bit more nuanced than the on page version of SEO. Fundamentally, as long as you have a solid site structure, have good content, and research your keywords you have for on page SEO; you will end up ranking fairly decent. Off site link building is where it starts to become more difficult, and much more competitive. Off page link building has been muddied by spammers and hackers trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the Google algorithm. Needless to say, it doesn’t work. And some of the biggest proponents of actionable, data-based SEO have now risen to the forefront of SEO to counter the spammy behavior of the past. Sadly, we are still seeing the same old song and dance in Ambler PA SEO.
Backlinks, what are they? Backlinks are the external links we spoke about earlier, except they go to your website instead of coming from your website. Be very careful when trying to get backlinks, there are services on places like Fiver that offer up backlinks for cheap; these are incredibly bad for your site to the point that our contract has a termination clause in it specifically for clients who try to use this method! Poor authority links are very common in Ambler PA SEO. Stay away from bad backlink neighborhoods. Backlinks will often come to your organically from having great content. We are also linked on our customer’s pages, check our most recent project Aggieland’s Mowing Crew for examples! Reach out and share your best content as much as possible, you will see people linking to it in no time!
Backlink Authority is how you know which backlinks are worth having. The spammers on sites like Fiver will give you links from comments, forums, and other low authority places. Google is very effective at weeding out these bad links and will normally prefer high authority links; think somewhere like Wikipedia. Wikipedia links out to high authority places like government studies and scholarly papers. If you’re just starting out, you probably won’t be getting links from Google Scholar, but you might get a few from smaller news sites, authorities in your niche, or websites based on things like business advice. Make your content something that people want to link to, it is as simple as that!
Ambler PA SEO is not all about the positives, there are a number of ways that you can be penalized by Google for putting out content that is not beneficial to users. A good rule of thumb when writing content is to internally ask yourself, “Will this content benefit anyone?” if the answer is a firm, “No” then you shouldn’t be writing that article without considering the relevance. Creating informative content that has value to users is the best way to avoid penalties, and is just the best practice for your business in general. Purchasing links from what Google deems as “bad neighborhoods” will also make Google think that you are creating spammy, low quality content. We see a lot of linking to bad neighborhoods in Ambler PA SEO, it is something to avoid like the plague! The third way that you could be penalized is by having large amounts of duplicated or plagiarized content. Plagiarism and duplicate content speaks for itself, it provides no value to users in search engines, why would Google ever show it?
What constitutes thin or spammy content? Spammy content is a problem we see all the time in Ambler PA SEO, it is very easy to recognize for the average person, it is boilerplate content that offers little to no value. Often spammy content is filled with product affiliate links that are meant to make the creator a few quick dollars from the user clicking through. While there is nothing wrong with having affiliate links in your content, you need to be careful about using too many of them in excess and losing out on the appearance of legitimacy in your content. This boils down to the concept of authority, which is the term Moz uses for the internal Google metric that is used to distinguish high quality content from spammy content. You can read more about authority here.
Ambler PA SEO Conclusion
Exploring the world of Ambler PA SEO has left us with these simple tips that could help out many of the people who have websites in Ambler Pennsylvania. Your SEO is an essential part of your digital strategy, I strongly encourage you to take it just as seriously as you would take your sales calls or client meetings. Businesses have been made and broken by the trends of search engines, just by using a few simple tips and continuing to learn you can start to formulate an SEO strategy that will let your business remains sustainable digitally. Next time we look at your content we want to see internal links, external links, good quality, images, healthy backlinks, and lots of shares!
If you need some extra help we are always happy to speak to you, Caveni is the leader in Philadelphia web design and SEO, we we are always up for a challenge!
