4 Essential SEO Elements
There are so many elements possible for you to optimize that you may possibly not know where to begin.
SEO can be incredibly complex, as well as exceptionally simple; it all depends on what you focus on. Precisely akin to everything else in marketing, when it comes to SEO, you have what works the best, what is imperative, what is not so important, what doesn’t really matters, and what is rubbish.
Obviously, you should spend most of your time on what works and is essential, so today I have decided to highlight what I consider the 4 most important elements of Google SEO.
On Page SEO Elements
On-page SEO is where it all starts, that is with your own site. There are just so many tweaks and tricks you can apply to improve your on-page SEO, but out of all those, I only found out 2 elements that really makes a difference in your general SEO work:
- Your Page Title.
- Your Text Content.
Keyword in Title
Having your keyword in your page title is really important.
I realize some of you may disagree that you have seen a first ranking site without their keyword in the page title, etc…, yes you will always be able to find some exceptions to any rule if you really want to, but that’s not the point.
You are required to get the keyword you want to rank for in your page title.
At this point, having it in your webpage title doesn’t signify that you have to spam your keywords everywhere either! For a good measure, compare to the highest ranking pages, how many times they use their keyword, this will give you a fairly good basic indication.
Keywords in content
Ok, when I talk about content, the golden rule is to write quality content; that is content that your readers will enjoy reading.
In all the search engines guidelines, you’ll find out that it is recommended to write for your readers, and not the search engines!
That said, having your main keyword, and some other associated terms here and there surely never hurt anybody.
This doesn’t mean you have to stuff your content with keywords, it’s truly ineffective, and furthermore it could harm you by getting you penalized for over-optimization.
Off-Page SEO Elements
If SEO starts on-page to get you indexed, there’s no doubt that it is your off-page SEO work that will get you ranked where you want to be in the search engines.
Among all the factors to take into consideration, the following 2 are critical to your success online:
- Your site Link Popularity.
- Anchor Text Of Your Inbound Links.
Link Popularity of your site
On internet, the popularity of a site is measure by how many pages, and preferably domains link towards your site or page.
Just think about each of thoseinbound links like a “vote”. In basic Google SEO help, the more votes a page has, the more popular it becomes, and thus the higher it should rank for the search engines.
Therefore your evident effort must focus on building quality inbound link in order to grow your link popularity.
And yes, the more commanding a page or site linking to you is, the more you profit from it; likewise, if the authority level of that webpage is awfully low or none, so will be the worth of this “vote”.
Anchor text of the inbound links
The second key element of your off-page optimization is the anchor text of your inbound links.
The numbers of inbound links do increase your popularity rank, but it is the anchor text used in those links that will notify the search engines what your website is popular for!
Let me say that again:
“The anchor texts of your backlinks tell the search engines what your site is popular for!”
So if you guess it right, your keyword should be there too.
Now, you want to keep things natural, so it’s important to vary your anchor texts, but as far as possible, offer your keyword or variation of it in the anchor text of the inbound links towards your site.
In Conclusion
There are just so many points to cover and learn about when it comes to SEO, and don’t worry, I’ll cover them all in my different free SEO training courses, but for those of you who are getting started or those of you who are getting confused at which element they should mainly focus on, this is the 4 elements of SEO that I consider essentials and will account for 80% of your search engine ranking position.
Pay attention on what works to start with, and sort out the rest later when you have time and opportunity!