Search Engine Optimisation for local businesses is an important marketing tool. There are many things that go into optimising a website to make it rank better in the search engines – some factors are technical, and require you to focus on on-site elements such as mobile friendliness, avoiding excessive redirects, and improving on-page factors. Some ranking factors, on the other hand, are off-site – primarily the number of incoming links and their quality.
To rank well, both on-site and off-site factors need to be up to scratch. If your website performs poorly, if it has excessive redirects, or if the links on your menus are so close together that mobile users can’t accurately click on them, then Google will pick up on this and you will get an automatic penalty.
If your website has lots of duplicate content, then it will be penalised for that. If it has no or very few incoming links, then it won’t rank well because the search engines will assume that it’s not a high quality page.
The same goes for if most of the incoming links are low quality. If only spammers link to your website, if all of your links point to the same page and have the same anchor text, or if most of your links come from signatures or from blog comments, then that’s a likely sign that your site is very low quality.
All of these things can be fixed. The best starting point is to install a good theme for your site. If your website is based on something like Magento or WordPress then there are plenty of free themes out there that will improve your site’s search engine friendliness.
Performing a full SEO audit of your website should reveal if there are other issues, such as duplicate content or thin content, that could be creating problems with your rankings. These on-site issues are easy to fix, since as you, the website owner, can change them. Off-site issues are harder to manage.
Spammy, low quality links could get you an algorithmic penalty, or a manual spam action penalty. Manual penalties tend to be given out only for the most serious of violations – where Google believes that there has been a concerted effort made to acquire fake, low quality links to game the ranking system. Algorithmic penalties can be fixed by simply cleaning up the low quality links, or disavowing them in Google Webmaster Tools, if the owners of the sites producing the low quality links are uncooperative about removing them.
Building good quality links – from high page rank and high domain authority websites, will greatly improve your rankings in the search engines. Some of these links may be acquired through article marketing or through press releases and blog exchanges. Some, may be built organically, as bloggers choose to link to your website. Collectively, the links will improve the visibility of your site to the search engines, and to end users too, increasing your traffic overall.
Search Engine Optimisation for local businesses is an important marketing tool. There are many things that go into optimising a website to make it rank better in the search engines – some factors are technical, and require you to focus on on-site elements such as mobile friendliness, avoiding excessive redirects, and improving on-page factors. Some ranking factors, on the other hand, are off-site – primarily the number of incoming links and their quality.
To rank well, both on-site and off-site factors need to be up to scratch. If your website performs poorly, if it has excessive redirects, or if the links on your menus are so close together that mobile users can’t accurately click on them, then Google will pick up on this and you will get an automatic penalty.
If your website has lots of duplicate content, then it will be penalised for that. If it has no or very few incoming links, then it won’t rank well because the search engines will assume that it’s not a high quality page.
The same goes for if most of the incoming links are low quality. If only spammers link to your website, if all of your links point to the same page and have the same anchor text, or if most of your links come from signatures or from blog comments, then that’s a likely sign that your site is very low quality.
All of these things can be fixed. The best starting point is to install a good theme for your site. If your website is based on something like Magento or WordPress then there are plenty of free themes out there that will improve your site’s search engine friendliness.
Performing a full SEO audit of your website should reveal if there are other issues, such as duplicate content or thin content, that could be creating problems with your rankings. These on-site issues are easy to fix, since as you, the website owner, can change them. Off-site issues are harder to manage. At Brand That Name, we can do this for you.
Spammy, low quality links could get you an algorithmic penalty, or a manual spam action penalty. Manual penalties tend to be given out only for the most serious of violations – where Google believes that there has been a concerted effort made to acquire fake, low quality links to game the ranking system. Algorithmic penalties can be fixed by simply cleaning up the low quality links, or disavowing them in Google Webmaster Tools, if the owners of the sites producing the low quality links are uncooperative about removing them.
Building good quality links – from high page rank and high domain authority websites, will greatly improve your rankings in the search engines. Some of these links may be acquired through article marketing or through press releases and blog exchanges. Some, may be built organically, as bloggers choose to link to your website. Collectively, the links will improve the visibility of your site to the search engines, and to end users too, increasing your traffic overall.
Read More
