Search engines take many factors into account when indexing pages for ranking. These factors can be divided into two categories – internal and external – which both need careful attention paying to them if you want your website to be more visible. Whereas most people are aware of the some of the factors; having great content, incoming links and strategically placed keywords, other factors are often overlooked.

An Overview of Internal SEO

The main attributes of internal SEO are:

• Page Titles and URL
• Website Content (including keywords and anchor text)
• Alt / Title Attributes
• Site Speed and Architecture

With the rise of social media, the importance of internal SEO has grown and changed. Good content has become paramount and linking content to social sharing applications (likes, pins and +1s) is now a crucial part of improving page rankings.

Additionally, web hosts need to be aware of what might be slowing their site down or making it harder to read, both for users and for the search engine crawlers who will be indexing your site. Websites need to be understandable, both for humans and for robots! Knowing more about how crawlers perform will help you to optimise your site so it appears higher in web searches.

An Overview of External SEO

External SEO refers to improvement of any external factors which might be impacting upon your site ranking, and is predominantly concerned with incoming links. The value of an inbound link will be assessed upon:

• The ranking of the page from which it originates
• Whether or not the link can be ‘trusted’
• The number of links and what anchor text is used to build them

Whereas these factors are quite simple to manage, there are other concerns which must be taken into account when managing the external SEO of your website. The age of the page from which your inbound link originates, the age of the link itself, its surrounding text and the statistics of your website activity – bounce, conversion and click through, etc. – all have an impact upon your site ranking. More worryingly is that external SEO can be more easily manipulated by third parties in order to create what’s known as ‘negative SEO’. This can be done by the creation of bad links which point to a competitor’s website, in order to bring about a penalty for ‘over optimisation’. This underhand practice cannot be completely avoided, but if you know what to look out for you will be able to identify negative SEO and take steps to remedy it. If you think you might be at risk from a negative SEO attack but aren’t sure what steps you can take, it’s recommended that you contact a professional SEO company for advice. Website penalties, once incurred, can be tricky things to remove.

Author Credit: The WebMarketing Group is an established SEO marketing company based in Harrogate, specialising in SMO, SEO, content writing and online PR.