There are many things you can do to the back end of your website to increase your SEO.
Yes I am a certified Google Partner so when I refer to a search engine, I usually say “Google“. However, there are multiple other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo. I’m sure your parents are familiar with them.
How does Google find your Edmonton website?
Google is a Search Engine. It follows links. Google follows links from one web page to another web page. A search engine like Google consists of an index, an algorithm and a crawler. Every day, Google goes through every website and saves an HTML version in a gigantic database, called an index. This index is updated if Google went to your website and found some new content or changes made. The more often you make changes, the higher you will rank. This Blog just increased my SEO!
In order to show my Edmonton site, Google needs to find a link to my website from another site it already knows. That link will lead to the first crawler session and the first save in the index. Both internal links (within your own website) and external links (from or to other websites) will help the ranking of your website with Google.
Yes Google has an algorithm that decides what pages show first and in what order. These factors are constantly changing, so it is best to work with a Google Partner to find out which keywords are the best for your site. Testing and experimenting gives a good feel for the important factors of the algorithm and the changes in these factors.
It is important to own the first page of Google when people search for your company. People don’t often go to Page 2, let alone Page 11, so where you appear matters. You should own the first full page of Google with your Google My Business Account, Google Map listing, Website, and Social Media sites, along with other links mentioning your company, articles or blog posts. If you do not take up every result, your competition will be there, grouped in as a similar company, product or service as yours.
Now Google Ads will be the first few results, but you can set up Google Ads for your own company as a keyword if you want to appear there too.
What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ?
SEO is something I specialize in, it is a profession that optimizes websites to make them appear in a high position in organic search results. Organic search results are natural and unpaid. SEO fits a website into Google’s algorithm.
The On-Page factors that decide the ranking of your website are:
- The quality of your code
- The structure of your text
- Useful, high quality, relevant content
- Page load time
- Image optimization
- Header tags
- Outbound links
- Different multimedia
- Broken links
- Readability
The Off-Page factors that decide the ranking of your website are:
- The links to your website
- Creating a recognizable brand
- Building links through guest posting and email outreach
- Submitting your articles to high-quality, relevant directories
- Having a presence on forums and other blogs
- Leveraging social media and influencer marketing
There are many Plug Ins that you can install into your website, that can help in writing SEO friendly content. My favourite is Yoast, but here are a few options for you to choose from.
- Yoast SEO.
- All in One SEO Pack.
- The SEO Framework.
- SEOPress.
- Rank Math.
- SEO Squirrly.
- Broken Link Checker.
- Rel NoFollow Checkbox.
There are no tricks, that replace good content and a strong marketing strategy. Please contact me for help coming up with a plan for your SEO.
Sarah Van Dusen
