What is SEO?
We hear about it all the time, its something all top rated website design agencies in Singapore always talk about when they pitch you their website packages.
The Most Basic Explanation we can think of is:
Getting Your Website In The First Page of Organic Google Search Results For Your Desired Search Terms
Of course, we don’t need to explain the benefits of being on the first of Google Search.
Simply do a Google Search for “SEO in Singapore“, and you will get a general idea of how many companies are offering such services in Singapore.
This can take a business from the verge of closing down, to a multi-million dollar status in a period of 12-36 months.
So let’s get started.
Firstly, you need a website that works.
Three important factors come into play when ranking.
- 100% Responsive Website. Don’t even bother trying to rank if you don’t have a responsive website.
- Low Bounce Rate. Basically, your website has to engage your users. If they enter, browse for a few seconds, and leave without clicking, or interacting, that’s considered a bounce. (Google knows your bounce rate, and you’ll be penalized for high bounce rate)
- Relevance – Your website has to be relevant for the keywords you’re ranking for. Don’t try to rank for “Website Design Singapore” when you have a Interior Design Firm Website.
In the wild west days of SEO, you could rank for any keyword you wanted to by doing things like keyword stuffing and other black hat methods.
Those days are LONG GONE.
Google is now more of a Semantic Search Engine than ever before.
In a nutshell, this simply means that it’s able to understand what topic your website is about, when it crawls your site and displays search results.
For example, if you run a Handyman Website, and you have pages that have “Fix Door Knob”, or articles about “Washing Machine Repair”, there is a really high chance that Google’s algorithm will understand that you run a handyman website, and start showing your site for handyman related search terms.
This is provided your content is original, well written, and not spun.
The best way to do this is to create a blog on your site, and start writing comprehensive articles about your industry, that will educate your users.
Not sure how to create a blog?
Check out one of the premier bloggers and SEO experts in the world, neilpatel.com to understand how a world class blog works.
Contact a Top Rated Website Development Agency to assist you with a minor revamp, and also help with a redesign if necessary.
Relevant Meta Information
This is simple to implement, Very important in SEO, and often ignored.
If you have a WordPress Site, go to your backend, download the Yoast SEO Plugin and activate it.
If you don’t have a WordPress site, you have to update your Meta information in either HTML or PHP.
Go to the bottom of each individual page, and inset the relevant keywords that you want to rank for, enter your meta title, meta description, and a SEO friendly slug.
This is how it should look like.
Page Load Speed
You have to make sure your website loads quickly.
An easy way to check your page load speed is to use tools like GTMetrix.
Your pages should load in less than 3 seconds, anything more than that, and it’s going to affect your rankings.
Can’t seem to get your page load speed down?
Contact an expert website developer, most of the good ones will give you a free consultation and teach you how, in the hope that you’ll hire them for bigger projects in the future.
Internal Link Structure and Anchor Text
Internal link structure is the practice of linking to your own pages throughout your website.
If you were to examine this article closely, you will notice that we’ve linked to multiple pages in our own website.
Let me explain this by referencing this article that you’re reading right now.
This article is highly relevant to “Website Design”, “Internet Marketing“, and “SEO”.
By placing anchor text links embedded in this relevant article, i am trying to rank my other pages for the above mentioned search terms.
Also, when other pages link to this page, the “link juice” from the linking domains will be spread the all the pages that are linked in this article.
That’s the simplest explanation that i can think of to explain internal linking, if you still don’t get it, please feel free to contact us for a free consultation, where we normally explain the full inner workings of SEO.
We like to talk alot.
And meet new people.
Link Building
Many SEO Experts are saying that link building is dying due to the latest Hummingbird update, but the fact is that link building is still a very important aspect of SEO.
What is link building, and why is it so important to Search Engine Optimization?
I am going to try to explain this in the most simple way that i think is possible.
Google sees every link to your website as a vote of confidence.
The impact that a certain link, or “vote” has on your website, highly depends on where it’s coming from.
Think of it this way, if the Prime Minister were to give you a vote of confidence, that would definitely have a great impact on your credibility as a whole, right?
The same concept applies, if you were to get a link from a High Authority domain, like Moz.com, the search engine is going to treat this as a very strong vote of confidence, and boost your credibility, making your site rank higher in search results.
It’s as simple as that.
But link building is one of the most time consuming, labour intensive, and difficult tasks to do in the Online Marketing space.
There are many kinds of link building techniques and practices.
Some work, and most don’t.
There are just too many SEO Gurus and Fake SEO Agencies offering SEO services these days.
For our Online Marketing Clients, we offer free SEO services for the first 3 months, as we don’t really believe in focusing on a single traffic source to grow businesses.
I’ll try to describe link building by using an example below.
Example: Mattress Cleaning Company Specializing in Dust Mite Removal
Link Building Strategy:
– Write a Detailed Blog Post about dust mites, “10 Things You Need To Know About Dust Mites”
– Start a Manual Outreach campaign, targeting local bloggers, and possibly every website you can think of with a High Domain Authority.
– Inform them that you have written this detailed article, and that you would gladly do a Free Dust Mite cleaning for them, if they would write a simple review, and include your link in their article.
– Another strategy that you can use, is to email everyone that you’ve linked out to in your article, informing them that you’ve used them as a reference, and just politely inform them that you would be absolutely delighted if they would link back to you.
Conclusion
We hope that you’ve been able to learn something in our simple and basic SEO guide.
Does this sound too complex for you?
Would you rather leave this to the experts, and focus on growing your business and generating revenue?
Contact Us, let us buy you a drink, and we can explain the inner workings of SEO, and how it can benefit your business greatly.
