Search engine optimization is a term often heard when it comes to implementing an internet marketing plan. Search engine optimization – otherwise known as SEO, is extremely important to know in order to get your website ranked in the search engines.

The choosing of the correct techniques is possible when you will click to read more at the official site. The preparation of the plan is possible to have great results. The presence at the online search engines provides the best results to the business owner for the promotion of products.

You know when you do a Google search and there are certain websites or terms that appear on the first page? Chances are, those websites and businesses know all about search engine optimization and are targeting specific keywords and following Google’s latest algorithm and rules that will allow them to appear higher than their competition in the search engines.

There are several factors that contribute to having a successful SEO strategy; we will list the following below.

On-Site SEO

On-site SEO relates to search engine factors that can be controlled directly on and from your website. There are many things to keep in mind when setting up your website and business and having a good strategy for on-site SEO is a must. Here are some things to look out for.

Website Theme

Your website should have a theme that is compatible with SEO and will allow the site to be seen in Google when someone searches for your products or services.

There are many website templates that will do this for you as well as plugins that will help you along the way if you’re a beginner with SEO. A good place to start is to use a WordPress based template and install the Yoast plugin. The Yoast plugin will help walk you through the correct SEO steps you need to take in order to get the most benefits from your website and content.

Titles

The tiles on your website should be between 10-70 characters long, be unique, and contain your most important keywords.

Description

Your website description will allow your website to be found organically in the search engine and encourage viewers to click on your website. It should be between 70-160 characters long and also contain your most important keywords. Organic search rankings means anything that appears in the search results because of relevant content on your website; it includes everything except for paid ads,

When you do a search in Google, or another search engine, you will see other websites titles and descriptions. That’s where they get displayed and why it’s important to have your keywords and an informative description to make viewers want to visit your site.

Tags and Keywords

When posting new content, it’s beneficial to make sure that your keywords (also called tags) are properly placed once in the title, once at the beginning of your content, once in the middle to the end of the content and once again in the tag or keyword section of your website.

XML Sitemap

A sitemap is a little more technical to understand but your web programmer and some plugins (Google XML sitemap) will help walk you through how to make sure your site has one. If you implement a sitemap to your website, it will help to automatically index your site when there’s new content and make your content available for all search engines to index and crawl your site.

Crawling: Google has little bots (also called spiders or web crawlers) that search all website links and make sure that they have relevant content and they are working correctly. After crawling the site for links, they bring that data back to Google’s servers.

Indexing: After crawling the search engines, Google collects pages to create an index based on location, keywords and relevant information.

Robots Txt File

It’s important to have a robots.txt file on your website because it will allow you to restrict or permit the search engines to crawl your website. Your web programmer or certain plugins (WP Robots Txt) can help guide you on how to set this up.

Google Analytics

Installing Google analytics on your website will allow you to discover what types of visitors are going to your website, how long they are staying, which types of content are the most popular and what channel sources they are coming from. It’s very important to have analytics and review your reports weekly so you can see if your marketing strategy is working, and what holes need to be fixed or revised with related to your SEO techniques.

Off-Site SEO

Now that we’ve taken care of the most popular on-site SEO techniques, we can look at what’s involved with the off-site SEO techniques. These techniques involve everything else related to SEO that are not directly involved with your websites template or setup.

Backlinks

Backlinks are other links that point back to your website from other websites. They, in essence, prove to Google that your site is worth looking at. Having quality backlinks is more important than the quantity of backlinks and it’s extremely important for your marketing strategy to have a plan to create good, consistent and relevant backlinks.

Many sites had their rankings drop suddenly because of Google’s new algorithm (Panda 4.0) update in 2014, which related to poor quality backlinks.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is important for an effective marketing strategy and your SEO plan because it will allow your content to be socially shared amongst many different social networking sites.

It’s important that you choose high PR (page rank) social bookmarking sites so that your content is compatible with the new algorithm changes. Bad backlinks can get your site penalized and if that happens, it will be a long recovery process.

Some of the top social bookmarking sites include, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Digg and Tumblr. When you share your content to these sites, it will have a better chance of getting shared and read amongst others, which will, in turn drive more traffic to your website.

Web 2.0 Properties

Having your website product and services listed on other websites is a great way to get traffic back to your site, show up multiple times in Google and give your site a high quality backlink. This is important for your SEO strategy because the more web properties your website links to and from, the better your rankings will be because your site will be seen as an authority website.