SEO Consultant Ireland

The Content is The King! –

Everyone working in the search engine optimisation industry (SEO) is asking themselves the same question: Is onsite optimisation more important than the offsite optimisation today? Are those inbound links from other sites really crucial in determining the sites ranking? Should one invest his time to do the optimisation of the page itself at all if the ranking is determined by the number and the quality of the inbound links?

Here is a test to answer to the question:

1. Register a new domain name.
2. Install some blogging software on it.
3. Set up your blogging software so that is sends a PING to the search engines when a new post is published.
4. Setup and configure the XML Sitemap generation and automatic submission after a new post is published on a blog.
5. Setup the SEO optimisation of your blog posts page – Title, Meta, URL rewriting, H1, H2,…
6. Write your first article with a Title of your blog post as the phrase you want to rank high in Google. For the purpose of this test take an easy 4 or 5 word phrase.
7. Wait from a few minutes to a few days, make a search for the phrase that is a tile of your blog post.
8. If everything is done right – you should have your blog post listed on the No 1. In Google within a week of registering a domain.

Note: there isn’t a single inbound link to that domain at all, and jet it ranks on top of the search for the specific phrase.

Conclusion:

Inbound links are important for your web site search ranking. But inbound links, regardless of their quantity or their quality (importance of the sites linking to you, and text they link to you with) cannot replace the content on your site. The test above proves the opposite scenario – where there are absolutely none inbound links, and the content on a well optimised web page itself made the page to rank on top in the search engine for the relevant keyword.

The Content is The King!

The right time to start planning your SEO Strategy is before you start the development of your web site. The SEO Strategy has to be taken into account while developing the site. Applying the SEO to the finished site will take more time and resources. It will waste your money. In some cases it will actually be more cost effective to build the completely new site, but this time with the SEO Strategy aspects in mind.

Your SEO Strategy needs to be based on the type of the site you are building. Some sites are likely to get (inbound) links to them and some are not. If your site is one of those that get the inbound links naturally (directories etc) you should evaluate if the inbound links should point to the main (home) page of your site – or would you be better off with ‘deep’ links that are theme based. If your site is not the natural “link magnet”, you need to think of the way to encourage webmasters to link to you.

The Content
The content is your best bet in the search engine optimisation. The qualities of the content that Google values are:

quantity
unique
fresh
well formatted – with keywords standing out

To rank your content high in Google it needs to be:

broken down in the separate pages
the right keyword density per page
Each page optimized for one or two keywords only
The unique TITLE Tag on each page – that contains the keyword the page is optimised for
The unique set of META Keywords Tags – containing the keywords the page is optimised for and more
The unique META Description Tags – containing,… you get it by now, don’t you?

Google is a bit like an accountant, it counts the words in various ways. You need to get the words in your web pages to get ranked for them. It is this basic fact that people forget.

The Links
When you have developed your site, filled it with your content, and applied all the on page optimisation, it is the time to tell the Google about it. Or the on page sitemap or the one submitted directly to Google is the starting point only. The key part of your SEO Strategy needs to be the way of obtaining the inbound links. Exchanging the links is a way for some sites, but the most of the sites your content quality will need to act as a link bait from the other web sites. The higher quality of the content the larger likelihood you will attract inbound links.

Diversifying your content is the best way to increase the chances of getting the inbound links. There needs to be something for everyone (in your target market). Naming your articles you have a way of controlling the text the inbound links will link to you with (anchor text), so here your keywords come again.

It is the combination of this onsite search engine optimisation and offsite optimisation, that is building links to your site that generates the results. One alone, even if perfect will not get any site ranked high.

Oh yes, choose your keywords before doing anything else! This is the most common mistake, not to do the proper in depth keywords analysis before you start planning your SEO Strategy.