The Seo blog

Content-Based SEO

This school of thought adopts the principle that the content of your website is what really matters. This could be described as the “purist” view which assumes that if people develop high-quality websites, they will be rewarded with high-quality search rankings.

The theory is that good content will attract attention, inbound links and other referrals. Over time the accumulation of good press will give you many of the same benefits as other methods of SEO. In addition, this type of “natural” referral tends to be more genuine, diverse, robust and long-lasting.

This approach is better suited to websites which can provide large quantities of content, especially unique content. If, for example, your website is about the life cycle of the native New Zealand tuatara lizard, you will probably have plenty of content in a field without much competition. In this case a modest amount of content and a few links from other sites will give you a good chance of being well-placed in the SERPS.

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Inbound Links (Backlinks)

Having links from other websites to yours is a critical part of search engine optimisation. As well as the obvious bonus of having people follow these links to your site, inbound links provide the following benefits:

* Search engine robots follow links between websites. The more inbound links you have, the more often robots will visit your site.
* Many search engines count links to your site as “votes” for you. They assume that if lots of websites link to your site it must be high quality. Page Rank is Google’s system of counting links.

The general rule is that the more inbound links you can get, the better. Getting more links should almost certainly be near the top of your priority list when optimising your site.

Important: Before you start trying to acquire inbound links, read this page and take heed of the warnings!

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SEO Basics

Before you begin serious SEO you must ensure that your website is “search engine friendly”. This means making sure that each individual page is compliant with search engine standards and ready to be indexed correctly. Follow each of the steps below for each page on your site.

Have your list of target keywords ready - you’ll need to insert them into your pages.

Page Title

The title of the HTML page should be relatively short and describe the page content accurately. Wherever possible, try to include keywords (without distorting the true purpose of the title). For example:

<title>McGrath Discount Office Furniture Store</title>

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When optimizing your website design for the search engines, keyword research is an integral step. If you’re optimizing your website for the wrong keywords, then your target audience will not find you in the search engines which means your SEO campaign will not be very effective.

There are a number of ways to research the keywords that your target audience is searching for - we’ve included two:

* Wordtracker
* Overture