Everything you need to know about SEO and outranking your competitors
Optimising a website for search engines is not easy and it’s a continuous process that takes time. Go through the most frequently asked questions on Search Engine Optimisation and find answers that can help you understand the basics of SEO and what techniques you can use to have your site rank higher than your competitors. What is SEO? When you enter a word or a phrase in a search engine, whether it’s Google, Yahoo, Bing or another one, and click “Search”, you get a list of search results that include that word or phrase. People usually visit the top 5-10 websites on that page because they consider them to be the most relevant to their search query. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is responsible for getting those sites in the top results on search engines. SEO is a technique that helps improve the visibility of a website or web page in a search engine’s list of results. This means that SEO helps a site rank higher than millions of other sites when people search for a certain word or phrase. Ultimately, SEO is responsible for getting more visitors to your site. What are Meta Tags? Meta Tags provide details on what type of information is included on a web page, thus helping search engines categorise it easier. These elements are inserted into an HTML document and are not visible to users visiting your site. Meta Tags are a very effective marketing tool because they are used to give users snippets of your website content. Thus, they’re a hook that you can use to get Internet users to visit your site. Read more on how to create meta descriptions. How do I create Meta Tags? InstantTraffic a search engine optimising tool from 123-reg, will help you create the perfect Meta Tags for your site by using a Meta Tags generator. This powerful tool gives you suggestions of Meta Tags you can use based on the content on your site. Where do I add Meta Tags? The Meta Tags generator tool from InstantTraffic will not only suggest the perfect Meta Tags for your site, but also show you exactly where you need to insert them inside your site’s HTML document. How can SEO help me? SEO is an invaluable technique for any site owner that wants to rank high in search engines and increase the number of users visiting the site. InstantTraffic includes everything you need to reach as many Internet users as possible. We can submit your site to over 400 search engines every month including Google, Yahoo and Bing to increase your website’s visibility which can lead to traffic increase. We will also advise you on what keywords to use to help increase your site’s rankings. What is Google Ranking or PageRank? Google Ranking or PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that determines how important a website is. The PageRank is responsible for your site showing up at the top of the first page of results or on the 15th page of results that almost no one visits. What elements influence the Google Ranking of my site? There are a number of factors that contribute to a better PageRank and the most important one is the number of quality websites that link to your site, also known as incoming links. An incoming link is interpreted by Google as a recommendation or a vote of support. Having links from websites with a high PageRank can also help increase your site’s PageRank. How long does it take for a website to have a good ranking? There is no exact answer because this depends on a lot of factors such as the quality of your content, relevancy, the keywords you are using and their location, and many others. However, if you publish quality content constantly and get authority sites to link to you, you can increase the chances of ranking higher faster. How long does it take for a website to be indexed? As for the previous question, there isn’t an exact answer for this question. For more information, read our blog post on this subject. Why doesn’t my website appear in search engines? If you have a new website and have already submitted it manually to several search engines, it may not be crawled and indexed right away. There are so many new websites that are submitted daily that it’s understandable why it may take longer for it to show up in search engine results. With our InstantTraffic SEO software, we can help get your site listed on Google within 8 weeks. We will submit it to numerous major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to increase your site’s visibility worldwide and get traffic to your site. How do I choose the right keywords for my website? InstantTraffic will perform a detailed keyword research in order to recommend you with a list of strong and relevant keywords that you can use. These will be targeted keywords that we will choose based on your audience, your competitors, your site’s performance and incoming links. Using the right keywords can help your site rank higher and ultimately increase traffic to your site. How can I get quality websites to link to my site? InstantTraffic will do an analysis on your competitors to determine what they are doing right so you can use this information to your advantage. You will be able to see what sites link to your competitors’ websites and where most of their traffic comes from. How can I market a website created with InstantSite, Website Builder and eCommerce from 123-reg? If you are using InstantSite or Website Builder website creation tools from 123-reg to build your site, then InstantTraffic is the perfect solution to market it on the Internet. It will help you increase your site’s visibility and get more traffic. Once you implement it, you will get to use the powerful InstantTraffic tools to modify the URLs, titles, descriptions, alt tags and keywords based on our recommendations. Do you have other
How long does it take for my website to get indexed?
Creating a great website nowadays is child’s play. Getting it indexed by most search engines is where it gets tough. I have a website, now what? Having your website online is not enough. Search engines can take a while to crawl and index your website. You must submit it to their index manually. This way you attract the search engines’ attention to your newly created website. I’ve submitted my website. Nothing happened. If you take into consideration just how many websites are submitted on a daily basis it is understandable why days may have passed without your website featuring in search engine results pages. How can I make the indexing process faster? There are some things you can check/fix in order to make sure your website can be crawled and indexed: Your pages must have a 200/OK server response Make sure you have actual content – although pictures and videos might be perceived as content for your users you also need to have text on your pages. Crawlers can’t see inside videos but they can definitely see the text. Don’t complicate your links – use simple HTML for the links on your pages. Don’t overcomplicate things by using JavaScript based events. Manually submit your website – if you think your website is ready then you can start submitting it to various search engines. Help your website get discovered – try talking about your website on other sites. Keep in mind these need to be relevant to your own website’s topic. Try finding only the quality websites that are both popular and reliable. With just one link placed on such a website you can ensure a faster indexation. My homepage is indexed but my other pages are not You can finally see your homepage listed in a search engine but where are the rest of your pages? There are several possibilities why your website hasn’t been completely indexed: You haven’t properly interlinked your pages – the crawler can’t get to every page of your website. In this case you should change the way your pages are linked to each other. Until you do that you should create a sitemap file that contains all your pages. When the crawler visits your site it will be looking for this file before crawling your website. You accidentally blocked the crawler’s access – you’ve disallowed the access to certain sub-directories from your robots.txt file or added the noindex tag on some of your pages. Check your robots file and see if you added any extra lines. Also check the pages you can’t find in search engines and see if these have the right server response or if they have a noindex tag in their source code. Robots.txt, sitemaps and server responses. I don’t know what does those are! Do not panic if you feel it is getting too technical for you. If none of the above makes any sense then you can simply use a service that will submit your website to search engines. 123-reg has its very own SEO software called Search Engine Optimiser which can help you get indexed. The best part? You don’t need any technical knowledge to use it. What will your software do for my website? Automatic submission It will save you some time by automatically submitting your website to hundreds of search engines – imagine doing that manually, it would take forever. By having your website indexed by so many search engines you will get worldwide exposure. Website improvement You don’t need to know SEO to understand what problems your website might have. The detailed SEO analysis of your website is clear, concise and easy to understand. By fixing your website’s issues you can get better ranks and more traffic. Competitor research See how well your website is doing in search engine results pages compared to your competitors. Personal control panel You don’t need to download or install anything. Your control panel is online which means you can access it from any device and any place. See the full list of Search Engine Optimiser features for more details and please come back and tell us how you think our SEO software can help improve your website’s visibility.