• Don’t buy backlinks

There’s always a guy at a forum who will swear that his high-quality links will send you to the top. That might be true, for a while. Once Google gathers enough data and discovers the footprint of his private blog network, you, along with all of his other customers, will be penalised for unnatural links. Getting out of that mess will cost your website months. Stick to organic backlinks that will withstand the closest of scrutiny. It will be better in the long run.

• Don’t use spun or duplicate content

Writing high-quality content is hard. You will need to practice for months before you get the hang of things. But that’s still no excuse for using barely readable spun content. And don’t even think about using PLR pack with 100 articles for less than a dollar. They’ve all been used before for years. Using low-quality content will just get your website sent to the bottom of the barrel. Once again, you will need months to climb out of the hole you dug for yourself.

Customers will run away from websites with slow loading times. Image courtesy of Pixabay

• Don’t place junk on your page

Google likes fast websites because they increase user engagement and make visitors happy. Visitors can quickly get unhappy with websites with slow load times too slowly. Up to 40% of users will abandon sites that take longer than three seconds to load. So keep your website trim and lean. Optimise all of your images, and use a CDN to serve them. Remove any flash or HTML5 animations. Don’t load video or audio directly from your server – upload them to YouTube, and use the embed function. And finally, run your website through an SEO auditor; it will tell you if the site is still too fat for its own good!

Only work with the best

You will want to make sure you only work with the best when it comes to outsourcing your SEO work and SEO services. Find an SEO service provider who only follows best practises.

The post Search Engine Optimisation – Mistakes appeared first on Web Accessibility.

• It’s the content, stupid!

Forget about everything else, and just focus on creating great content. So many websites these days compete using mediocre content. Imagine how well you’d do if you have a spectacular content in your corner? Once you’ve created a large number of awesome content, then worry about the intricacies of SEO.

• Keywords and key phrases

Search engines’ robots and crawlers are not humans. Nor are they capable of creativity or critical thinking. However, they have been trained to observe keyword relevancy and keyword density. If your keyword is too broad, the competition for ranking will be overly tough. If your key phrases are irrelevant and are in conflict with the title and meta tags, the robots will ignore it and look for more deserving content.

Focus on less popular keywords to gain rank faster. Image courtesy of Pixabay

• Create a good sitemap

Did you know that robots will come more frequently to websites which give them easy access and easy navigation? A good sitemap tends to create a welcoming atmosphere for them. If they come regularly, your content will be indexed faster. And on one fateful day, the trending item you’re writing about will be ranked first since it’s the earliest – imagine the traffic then!

• Write product reviews

No, don’t go for popular products. Instead, focus on the lesser known ones, since the business will be more appreciative of a review. Obviously, you need to use the product first to ensure a fair and accurate review. Once you’re done, send the company a link of your review and wait. If they like it, they will quickly post the review on their site as a testimonial – and you’ll receive a wonderful backlink. Repeat the process as many times as you desire and reap the inevitable rewards.

The post Search Engine Optimisation – Best-practices appeared first on Web Accessibility.

Guest blogging is an excellent way to improve off-page optimisation. Image courtesy of Pixabay

Where are the backlinks coming from?

The primary criteria of off-page SEO is the quality of backlinks pointing back to your site. It is always quality over quantity. There are a few methods which can be used to indirectly create more backlinks for your website. This includes:

• Creating high-quality, engaging content which compels readers to link to the page on their website

• Share useful infographics on social media. Aside from the referral traffic, social media share of the content will also create new backlinks.

• Design an outreach strategy (e-mails, meet-ups, etc.) to build relationships with other influencers sharing the same niche with you.

• Pursue guest blogging opportunities from established websites in your niche.

These are not one-time methods. Webmasters must continue with it over a period of time. In addition, Google forbids buying links from websites. Such attempts are considered a manipulation of search results and will result in the dreaded Google penalty.

Quality over quantity

Search engines absolutely prefer quality backlinks. In fact, accumulating low-quality backlinks could lead to penalties. As such, webmasters must tailor the off-page strategy accordingly and gear their approaches towards authority sites.

No one knows the optimal number of backlinks for any particular page or website. However, experts do believe that the growth of backlinks must be gradual. Sudden spikes might suggest unnatural link acquisition, and could invite scrutiny from search engines.

Although Google Search Console provides extensive information about inbound links, it is advisable for webmasters to use third-party auditing tools like Moz’ Link Explorer to instantly view the quality of all backlinks.

Best practise SEO companies are rate but they do exist. This means you can find companies who can help you build high quality links from the best referring domains, at scale.

The post Search Engine Optimisation – Off-page appeared first on Web Accessibility.

Adhering to search engine recommendations can help websites rank higher. Image courtesy of Picryl

Notable elements of on-page optimisation

• Keywords

Keywords and semantically-related terms help search engines identify the theme of a particular page and associate it with search queries. Keyword accuracy is important for relevancy. However, the extreme density of keywords could degrade search rankings.

• Meta tags

Meta tags are HTML attributes which helps search engines to classify web properties. These attributes can also be used to instruct crawlers to bypass specific pages.

• Content

Well-written and engaging content with suitable rich media attachments with proper use of keywords heavily influences search ranking. However, duplicate or spun content with poor sentence structure and grammatical errors can negatively affect ranking.

• Page load

Poorly optimised page with slow loading time (usually exceeding three seconds) will be penalised by search engines as they reflect poor user experience. Data from Google shows that fast loading sites had up to 70% longer sessions, as well as lower bounce rates. As such, developers and webmasters are advised to optimise all elements on the website, particularly images and codes. The use of CDN to serve images is a very good way to reduce the size of webpages.

• Page architecture

Search engines place a premium on user experience. As such, webpages should have easy and convenient access to navigation for visitors. Websites should also have a sitemap to enable robots to efficiently crawl through the site without any duplicate inspections. Search engines also advise against using AJAX applications as crawlers have trouble reading them.

Webmaster should consider using external auditing software to evaluate the structure, code, load times and keyword density of their website. The result of the audit can help to further improve the efficiency of websites.

To conclude, keep things high quality and natural. Don’t be tempted by promises of over-night rankings and start with an SEO agency who follows Google’s guidelines.

The post Search Engine Optimisation – On-page appeared first on Web Accessibility.

We know now that the presence of unhealthy links originating from weak or spammy domains can negatively affect your website’s search engine optimisation. In fact, Google has specifically noted that unnatural links can diminish the authority of websites, leading to the devaluation of their search rank. This development has also created the possibility of malicious link-bombing campaigns by competitors or blackmailers.

You do not want backlinks from websites like this. Use the Disavow Tool to get rid of spammy backlinks. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Google Disavow Tool

At times, websites that run afoul of Google’s quality guidelines will be served with manual penalties. As bad as that sounds, manual penalty notifications are actually a good thing. Google does not immediately penalised websites served with manual webspam penalties and usually give webmasters time to rectify the situation. The far damaging occurrence is when your website receives a silent algorithmic penalty that will see its search engine ranking position fall into oblivion, out of the first 1,000 pages of search queries.

In both instances, Google’s Disavow Tool will be your best bet to rectify the situation. Instead of individually emailing websites to seek their assistance in removing offending backlinks, you can just renounce said links from being factored into Google’s ranking algorithm using the Disavow Tool. Remember, the Disavow Tool can be used pre-emptively to deal with emerging quality issues.

How To Use Google’s Disavow Tool

Go to Google Search Console and download all the links pointing to your site. Analyse the spreadsheet carefully and delete all backlinks you are comfortable with; you will be left with only the damaging, unnatural links. If you feel the need to disavow the entire domain instead of just a single page, add the operator “domain:”, as in “domain:damaginglinks.com”.

Copy the remaining backlinks into a text file. Please ensure that the file is encoded in either UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII format. Return to the Search Console and click on the Disavow Tool. Upload your text file. Save a local copy for future amendments. The disavow process is a gradual one, so you might not see an immediate result. Restoration of your site’s ranking might take days, weeks or even months.

The post Search Engine Optimisation – Index appeared first on Web Accessibility.