The Three Pillars of SEO

Three Main SEO Elements

Getting a high rank in search engines has become a big part of business success. Achieving results takes knowledge, skill and patience. The more competition you face, the harder it is to win.

There are three main elements that contribute to a page ranking well. Those three elements are on-page optimization, off-page optimization and the human element.

On-Page Optimization:

On-page SEO efforts generally relate to the tags and the textual content of the page. The places where you want your keywords to show up are in the URL, the title tag, H1 and H2 tags and ALT tags. You also need your keywords to show up in the body of the text and in the last paragraph of the page.

Keyword tags don’t carry the weight they used to, but description tags are still important. The description doesn’t matter to search engines, but it does matter to people. The description shows up as part of the search result. People see the page title and the description. Think of your description as your ad copy. Describe the value your page offers viewers.

There are technical considerations for using the keyword in the body of your text like keyword prominence, frequency and density. Writing content with sufficient keyword density is a challenge when you consider the fact that it also needs to be readable.

Site structure, page load time and other aspects of your domain and hosting are also an important part of successful on-page optimization.

Off-Page Optimization:

As much as on-page optimization is discussed, it's off-page optimization that carries more weight. Google pays more attention to the way other sites link to your page. Not every link carries the same degree of importance. Google favors a link from a highly popular website much more than a little known site.

One of the popular ways of getting inbound links is through articles. The practice involves writing articles and submitting them to as many article directories as possible. The articles need to have links to your page, using the anchor text of your choice. Anchor text refers to the words that are associated with the link to your page. These type of links are low quality compared to links from high ranking popular sites that are much harder to obtain.

Human Behavior:

When I refer to human behavior in SEO efforts I';m referring to two different things. The first thing relates to the content and the way it’s arranged on your page. The first principle is to put something of value to the reader on the page. It also needs to be easy to read and digest, or they’ll not be likely to stick around.

The other principle is closely related. Google looks at how many people go to your page and how long they stay or what else they click on once they get there. If people leave right away Google figures that the content isn’t valuable to people, and it shouldn’t show up high in their rankings. Google wants to deliver the most relevant, useful content to its customers.

This is a very simple breakdown of SEO principles, and there’s a lot more to the game than what can be described in one article. If you want help from a true expert I’d like to recommend Will Hanke, a St. Louis SEO professional.

 

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