The Secrets of SEO

By Simon  |  5 Jun 2019 13:00:00

How To Increase The Rank Of Your Website

Many website owners obsess about the on-page SEO of their website, such as the use of the title, h1,h2 and h3 tags and having quality content liberally peppered with the keywords that they are trying to promote.

Of course - on-page optimisation is extremely important - especially the title tag which is probably the single most important aspects of SEO on any web page. However it's usually only a small part of SEO.

I say usually - as if you are selling Sparkling Widgets and there is only one other merchant selling Sparkling Widgets, then you'll be able to get on the first page of Google just using on page SEO on your website. This is why SEO is totally dependent on the number of other websites vying for position using the same keywords.

That's also why a well meaning SEO expert will tell you that they've managed to get sites to number one of Google just by changing the text and content on a web page.

A more complex situation arises where a merchant is trading in items with little competition for a number of years, but then finds themselves dropping off Google as more competition arrives. This is often a cause of huge frustration as the merchant is not familiar with the action to be taken to rank higher as it's not something they've had to look at before.

For most merchants in competitive niches, it's not possible to rank in the top 10 based solely on On-Page optimisation - as it only really accounts for about 30% of your SEO.

The missing 70% of SEO is of course Backlinks. This is where you need to have links to your website from other quality websites. It's easy to ignore this as you can't see it on your website and also as it takes a lot of effort to aquire quality backlinks. A strange irony is that some businesses would rather fold than put in the effort required to actually promote their businesses - usually because they've had years of success without needing to do this and they simply don't want to do hands-on marketing.

Every business owner needs to be a Marketeer however much they would prefer to pick and pack products, or drive down the price with suppliers, or get involved with the day to day running of the business. the truth is that the success of any business depends on the effectiveness of the marketing which is a constantly changing landscape.

So what do you do about backlinks?

I'm going to show you an incredible shortcut that will make it a lot easier for you to work out what you need to do with backlinks.

Go to https://www.ahrefs.com/backlink-checker and do a search for your own website.

Make a note of the 'Domain Rating' at the top. This is how important Ahrefs thinks the site is based on the quantity and quality of the backlinks. If it is under 70 then you definitely need to improve it. 

Ahrefs is without question the best service for checking these backlinks - we've been running ecommerce services for nearly 20 years and their spiders operate just like Google's - which is essentially what they need to replicate.

Now go to Google and find out who is ranking in the top 5. Do a search for each of those on Ahrefs and see what their domain rating is. Most likely it will be higher than yours - assuming you are not already in the top 5. 

Now - the main part of this - Ahrefs shows you the links pointing to your competitor sites. Find those links with a high DR (in the DR column) e.g. 80-90 and then you need to get those pages to link to your own site. This is where it takes time. Clearly you won't be able to get on all of them, but it will give you ideas on which companies you need to contact and where you might get links to your site.

Alternatively you can pay someone else to do it. - We're actually contemplating starting a service to provide this ourselves - Do let us know if of any interest.

What you mustn't do though is pay a random internet service to 'get backlinks' when you don't know what they are actually going to do. At best you'll get links on loads of low quality sites which won't help you at all. At worst Google will detect what you have done and ban you from their search results (known as a 'Manual Action').

One final thing - we offer another service which you can use for On Page optimisation and also to show you how to get more from Google and Facebook ads - take a look at that at www.sitebam.com

Give it a go and post your comments below - it would be great to hear some success stories. Many people have the impression that Google is a black box, however if you have great on-page SEO and Lots of Quality Backlinks then your site will fly to the top. (Except in one specific case - which we'll be talking about in our next blog post).

Happy SEO'ing :)