Bay Area Inbound Marketing Blog

SEO: How to Pop to the Top of a Google Search by Bay Area Inbound

Posted by Laurie Monahan on Wed, Jan 18, 2012 @ 11:10 AM

Now that you’ve chosen your keywords, you can increase your website's chances of ranking for those keywords. Search engine optimization (SEO) is about doing just that!

In order to get found, you should aim to be on the first page or in the first few search engine results pages for your keywords.

Google suggests that you design your website for visitors, and not for search engines. While you should keep this principle in mind, it is worthwhile to learn a bit more about SEO in order to better optimize your site.

What You Should Know About SEO

SEO can be divided into two separate categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO refers to how well your website's content is presented to search engines. This can often be improved immediately.

Off-page SEO refers to your site’s overall “authority” on the web, which is determined by what other websites say about your site. This can take time to improve.

Even though on-page SEO accounts for only about 25% of how search engines score and rank your website, it’s worth tackling first since it can be improved quickly.

Test Your SEO With WebsiteGrader.com

To find out how well optimized your website is, run it through HubSpot’s free SEO tool, Website Grader. This tool will analyze your website and provide you with an overall score between 0 and 100. The higher the score, the more SEO-effective it is. These scores are based on a percentile scale, meaning that if you scored a 54, your website has scored better than 54% of the more than 3.5 million websites that Website Grader has analyzed. For on-page optimization, the most relevant part of this report is Part II: Optimize.

Do not be discouraged if your SEO score is a little low. If this is the case, you can probably get your website back in the game with only a little bit of work on your on-page SEO.

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Topics: keyword search, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, blogging