There are many factors that will affect the search engine optimization (SEO) of your site, some of which you may not be aware of. SEO is sometimes seen as a big secret that the ordinary person cannot wrap their minds around. But the truth is, SEO is actually a organic process that touches every aspect of your site, from the layout to the content on the site. It’s a combination of every part of your website and not just one thing. It is complex, but broken down into components it’s very easy to implement.
The Code
From the first time you think of building a website, SEO should be in your mind. The way that your code translates to various search engines what it wants to show the user is an important component of SEO and can affect it greatly.
The code tells the search engine what the title of your site is, the topic covered, the titles of every page, as well as what the images and content on the site are about. By paying attention to the code in your site, making it as clean as possible, and including these factors, your search engine ranking will increase.
The Content
Fundamentally SEO is about keyword-rich content because that is how your audience uses a search engine to find a website. The end user types in a keyword phrase, hits enter, and shazam! – the search engine returns results that it hopes are relevant to your search.
The keywords that your target audience uses to search for you must appear within the content of your website in order to rank in a search result. To create this content, it is important to be creative in terms of all the copy on your site – including the navigation links, anchor text, images, descriptions and blog posts.
Inbound Links
Inbound links are still important for higher search engine rankings, so they are very important components that affect SEO. Links that work best aren’t fabricated, but occur naturally in the course of the life of your website. For instance, if a lot of people like the site, and due to liking the site link to it from their website, search engine ranking goes up.
If no one links to the site for any reason, the ranking will be less. Engaging in article marketing, guest blog posting, social media sharing, and other efforts such as these can improve the number of inbound links to your site exponentially – as long as the links created are high quality links from authority sites.
The Age
While you cannot alter the age of your site, you’ve heard that aged sites with great content will rank higher in search results. It’s true, and this can be a frustrating component of SEO that you have no control over. However, there is one thing about the age of your site that you can control: when the domain name expires.
Buy your domain for longer periods of time than one-year intervals. If the search engine sees that your site does not expire for ten years down the road, it will perceive a higher confidence level of the importance and relevance of your site than if it expires within the year.
These four factors affect SEO in various ways, but each matters tremendously in their own right. By keeping each in mind as you build your website, and add to your built website, you’ll begin to see your ranking improve exponentially.