What Do You Need to Balance When Doing SEO?

SEO & Getting the Balance Right

So you asked ‘What do you need to balance when doing SEO’? If fact, another 69 people asked this question on Google, so we thought, heck, let’s help answer this!

First, let’s define what exactly SEO is [if you don’t already know by now!] and then we can take you through what it is that you need to balance well, when you are doing SEO for your website.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of optimizing a website for different keywords or phrases so that when they are searched on Google, that website is found. It is a very powerful way to get your business in front of your target audience when they are searching for the keywords associated with the product or services you sell. For example, if you sell fish bowls then you want your fishbowl website to be found through Google when someone searches ‘fish bowl’ ‘buy fishbowl ‘best fish bowls’, so on and so forth.

When someone searches such a term and they then find your business, the trust and authority Google has been passed on to your website and your business and most likely you will end up selling more fishbowls!

SEO marketing is considered to be one of the most powerful marketing there is as it yields the best ROI compared to any other marketing channels including PPC and Social Media advertising. The beautiful thing is, once you start ranking in those corvette top positions on Google, you often stay there for a long time, and continue to drive leads or sales from those rankings for years and years. Powerful stuff!

Optimized vs Over Optimized

Like life itself, balance is key when you are doing SEO optimization, but what exactly do we need to balance?

One of the most important elements to balance correctly when doing SEO for your website is to ensure that it is SEO optimized and friendly towards the search engines [namely Google] but that at the same time isn’t over-optimized for the keywords you are looking to target. Remember, nowadays, UX is key, that’s User Experience, so if you offer a good UX, then Google will probably reward you for this.

“Don’t over-optimize, focus on User Experience Instead!”

There are many guidelines out there to just how best to optimize your website and specific landing pages for keywords you are looking to target, including how many times you should have that keyword on the specific page, what keyword variations you can look to include as well as semantic variations and where exactly to place those keywords in the body of the text.

Remember these are only guidelines and to really understand how well optimized your page is, then you need to have that content published, indexed by Google, ranked and then you can see how it actually performs. You can then go back to the page and reoptimize it accordingly to get it ranking higher up the Google ladder, and in many ways, it is this back and forth, A/B testing that will get your site ranking where you want it to be.

Finding the right balance between optimizing your site, and ensuring it isn’t over-optimized, in our opinion is one of the most important things to consider when asking ‘What do I need to balance when doing SEO?’

But what else is worth balancing when it comes to your website’s SEO?

Internal Link Structure

Links are necessary for your content to rank. When your posts and pages are linked to somewhere on the web, Google is more likely to find them. Also, internal links provide Google with a sense of your website’s structure by connecting your content. With them, you can establish a hierarchy on your site, giving the most important pages and posts more link value than other, less important pages. This can help your SEO!

What are internal links?

An internal link connects one page on your website with another page on your website. Search engines and users both use links to find content on your website. Link navigation helps users find content on your site and navigate around it. Search engines also make use of links to navigate your site. In the absence of links to a page, they will not see it.

There are a variety of types of internal links. Links can also be added within your content in addition to links on your homepage, menu, and post feed. These are called contextual links. They lead the user to content that is interesting or related to their interests. Additionally, they allow search engines to find which content on your site is relevant and determine its value. The more links a significant page receives, the more important it will seem to search engines. Therefore, good internal links are crucial to your SEO.

So remember, getting the right balance of links on each page on your website is crucial for successful SEO optimization!

Follows Vs. Non-Follow [Backlink Building]

We need to provide a bit of background about how most links work in the world of SEO before explaining follow vs. no-follow links. A site page gets a small SEO boost when it receives an inbound link, which is a hyperlink pointing to it. Think of links as points, and the more links you have, the more points you will earn.

Google keeps track of these factors, looking at how many inbound links a page has and from which sites. It must be a good page if so many people are linking to it! When Google sees so many people linking to it, it must be a good page! We should prioritize that page over others of a similar topic in our search engines, so that users can easily find the very best pages.

To calculate link points, Google developed a metric called PageRank. It is common for SEO professionals to refer to link points as “link juice.” The link juice flows through sites and into new ones via hyperlinks. The more reputable the site, the more link juice it gets. Links from the New York Times or BBC for example are pure gold, and you may as well retire!

We can now define a follow link – Follow links are links that count as points, boosting the ranking of linked-to sites in the SERPs and promoting SEO link juice.

What is a No Follow Link?

In SEO, a no-follow link does not count as a point in the page’s favor, does not boost PageRank, and does not boost a page’s placement in the SERPs. No follow links are ignored. It’s a lonely life for them.

Nofollow links are created using the nofollow link HTML tag, which looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.website.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Link Text</a>

In essence, a no follow tag tells search engines, “don’t count this.”

Isn’t that just mean and awful? How could anyone do that? There’s a very good reason for using the no follow attribute!

Google uses the natural do-follow form of links to determine PageRank. The more links a website has, the higher its page rank. Basically, PageRank’s purpose is to see what pages are the most popular (and therefore, likely the best in quality) and deliver those pages to searchers.

We live in an imperfect world, and some self-proclaimed SEO “experts” use black-hat, unethical methods to inflate search engine rankings, and link building before the Nofollow attribute was an easy way to do so.

Black-hat SEOs discovered PageRank and all hell broke loose! Now it was all about links for SEO. Inbound links meant higher PageRank, so SEOs were determined to get as many links as possible, even if that meant spamming everyone on the web. Bloggers’ comments were filled with self-promotional nonsense and gibberish linking.

Therefore, the no follow link tag has been very beneficial for the online world – most SEO spammers won’t post irrelevant links to blogs or forum posts if they know they won’t get a follow link. A great example is, that both WordPress and Wikipedia automatically attribute the no follow link attribute to all user-submitted links.

So our third point here, get a good balance between follow and no follow links as this will impress Google and you won’t get flagged as being a spammy black hat website!

Your Time

Lastly, the most important point to remember when working on your SEO is to balance your time! SEO takes a lot of time and effort, creating content, optimizing old content, running audits, posting content, pinging Google to get content indexed, creating landing pages, building links, and look, the list goes on!

Most business owners simply don’t have the time to do SEO, and even if they do, it doesn’t mean they will do a good job at it!

SEO is a serious discipline and having up-to-date knowledge on how to optimize websites following best SEO practices is kind of a full-time job!

So if you are doing SEO yourself, find the right balance between how much time you spend on link building and on content creation, on link outreach and blog optimization, on internal link building and technical SEO. But if you are in any doubt that is why we are here to help!

In Conclusion

SEO is complex and finding the right balance is key to success in getting your website ranking in those coveted top Google positions.

If you have any questions or need any help, then simply reach out to us via WhatsApp or email us, and we would be more than happy to help you with getting your website ranking!

Contact Us!

If you are interested in learning more about building out your business listings in the UK or general SEO for your website, contact us today by clicking the WhatsApp link below, visiting our contact us page or emailing us [email protected]!