Simple seo is just that. Simple. You can get top ten rankings in the SERPS in many industries just by following some very basic (on the whole, onsite) seo tips, and I’m going to share with you how.

It’s worth pointing out that you *typically* have three chances to tell Google what a page is about, and how important the page is.

  1. On Page – The actual text content of the page
  2. On-Site – In internal links to the target page
  3. Off-Site – In links to the target page from other websites

OK – You’ve got your site….. it’s got the usual stuff – home page, contact page, about us, map, products – but you have a blog! A blog lets you easily add pages. That’s all you really need, although you can do this without a blog of course, but then you need to know a bit about website design.

In a site, there may be some evidence that the more you link to a page in your website navigation structure, the more important Google seems to think that page is, in relation to the rest of your site at least.

Pages that aren’t linked to frequently may not have enough link equity to make it into Google’s main SERPS.

  1. Optimise 1 page for 1 keyword (multiple related keyphrases)
  2. Make sure you have a keyword rich page title, Keyword in H1, bold keyword once, in the name of the actual file
  3. Link to this page from your site / global navigation with the anchor text “keyword”
  4. Don’t link out from that page with the exact anchor text “keyword”
  5. Going forward, try and encourage other sites to link to this page with the anchor text “keyword” as opposed to your home page. This is called deep linking. Of course, the more unique and better quality the information on your page, the easier it is to achieve this.
  6. Sometimes, I consider linking out (where relevant on this page) to other quality sites

Thinking: A well optimised page followed with a few incoming links from external sites will perform very well in Google, and is boosted when you tell Google “Hey – This page is important”, by linking to it from every other page on your site. Not linking out to any other page (from the target page) with the exact term you are targeting tells Google as far as this page is concerned, it’s the authority document on the matter (which is the aim of SEO).

Warning: This works well for small sites, with a few products. Using this strategy on a site with a lot of target pages will have mixed results, and you risk making the site look spammy.

If it’s newsworthy content your adding to your blog, add it to Digg or Mixx (or whatever), drop a link in a couple of forums with the anchor text in it. This helps Google work out what the page is about, too.

Simple SEO might be all your website needs to get better rankings in Google.

As this post is aimed squarely at the novice, I thought I’d mention:

  1. What is Anchor Text? – It’s the text that makes up an actual link
  2. What are SERPS = Search Engine Results Pages

Always remember not all links are equal. Nothing helps an individual page more than on-topic links from reputable websites, but it’s clear you don’t need thousands of links to get top rankings in Google.

Make a relevant, well optimised page that is well linked to in your internal site structure, and back it up with a few anchor text rich links from external sites. This strategy helps leverage the overall authority of your domain to rank specific pages, ideal if you’ve not a lot of authority to begin with. :)

Tip to Remember - Give Google what it wants – Optimise your page, and always link generously to your important pages within your site navigation and content.

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