Understanding what helps your business rank higher on Google
To build a strong online presence, you must become familiar with the many strategies within the umbrella of search engine optimization (SEO). It’s an ever-changing process that should be monitored regularly for any form of success.
In particular, you'll need to focus on three key SEO components: keywords, backlinks, and anchor text. In this blog, we'll discuss each of these techniques and how you can use them to improve your site ranking and visibility.
SEO Keywords & Keyword Research
To start, let's focus on SEO keywords. These are the words or phrases that users enter into search engines when looking for information on a specific topic. For example, if you're a plumber in Peoria, IL, someone might search for "plumbing services in Peoria, IL." As a business owner, choosing the right SEO keywords for your website is essential so people can find your business online.
There are two types of SEO keywords:
1. Short-tail keywords
These are general, one- or two-word keywords with high search volume. For example, "plumbers" would be a short-tail keyword.
2. Long-tail keywords
These are more specific, three- or four-word phrases with lower search volume. Returning to our plumber example, "sewer line repair Peoria, IL" would be a long-tail keyword.
You'll need keyword research to find the right SEO keywords for your business. This involves using keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush to identify relevant keywords for your business and website.
Once you have identified a list of relevant, high-volume SEO keywords, start incorporating them across your website content, meta-title, meta-description, and headers to improve your visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs).
SEO Backlinks & Link Building
In SEO, a backlink is an inbound link from one website to another. In other words, it's a link that points from Website A to Website B. Backlinks are influential in SEO because they act as votes of confidence from one site to another. The more backlinks your website has, the more Google and other search engines will trust it, and the higher it will rank in search results.
To build backlinks, you'll need to engage in link building, which is deliberately creating links on other websites. You can use several link-building strategies, but some of the most effective include guest blogging, broken link building, and the skyscraper technique.
Create Sharable Content: One of the best ways to get other websites to link to yours is to create content worth linking to. It could be a blog post, an infographic, a guide, or a video. Whatever type of content you create, make sure it's high-quality, informative, and relevant so that other website owners will want to share it.
Guest blogging: This great strategy involves writing articles for other websites in your industry and including a link to your website in return. It's a great way to build relationships with other businesses in your industry while increasing the number of backlinks pointing to your website.
Broken link building: This is an efficient strategy that involves finding broken links on other websites and then offering to replace them with links to similar content on your website. To do this, you can use a tool like AHREFS to find broken links on other websites in your industry. Once you've found a broken link, reach out to the site owner to let them know, and offer to provide a working link to a relevant page on your website as a replacement.
Skyscraper Technique: This strategy involves finding popular content in your industry and creating even better content. To do this, use a tool like BuzzSumo to find the most popular content on a related topic. Once you've found a piece performing well, create a version that offers more comprehensive research, provides more data, or offers in-depth analysis. Once you have your new and improved piece of content, reach out to the websites that have linked to the original and let them know about your content.
Link building can be time-consuming, but it's essential for SEO and will support your organic traffic and growth goals.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text on a web page that links to another web page. It's the part of a link that appears on a web page - usually blue and often underlined.
In short, anchor text provides a positive user experience, giving context to users, and supporting search engines who send their crawlers to learn about the website. In addition, the anchored text will provide information about what the relevant page is about. Search engines also use anchor text when they index web pages to understand their topic and rank them accordingly, so it's important to use keyword research in your anchor text thoughtfully.
If the referenced web page or content is irrelevant to the current discussion, this may result in a poor user experience for your website visitors. On the other hand, search engines will devalue your site due to the linked content's lack of value.
Some tips to optimize anchor text include:
● Make sure the target web page is relevant to the linked text
● Use keyword-rich anchor text when possible
● Avoid keyword stuffing and overusing the same terms
● Use a variety of different anchor text, including brand names, partial keywords, full keywords, and generic phrases
● Link text should be concise
● Avoid using the same anchor text for all links on
Building an online presence requires thorough SEO education around strategies like keyword research, backlink building, and strategic anchor text. With these three elements working together, you can improve your website's ranking in search results, drive organic traffic to your site, and build a powerful online presence.