SEO Training

In my last post I wrote about on-page search engine optimisation.  Of course that is only half the story.  Unless you are lucky enough to operate in a vertical with no competition then you are going to need to do some off-page SEO too. Understanding how google works is imperative if you want to make progress in this area.

Build links to elevate your website in Google (SEO for SERPS)

Off page SEO is where most sites fall down.

Most sites fall down somewhere in their SEO efforts.  If you are happy that your on-page SEO optimisation is up to scratch then it is time to look at off-page optimisation.

How Google rates your site in plain english.

The currency of the web is links. Every link provides important information for search engines like Google. This information is used to rank your website in terms of importance when somebody does a search.
There are some key factors in establishing which sites are most relevant for whatever has been typed into the Google search bar. In establishing how important your page is relative to others, these are some of the more important factors: -

1. How many other pages link to your page? Look at it logically.  If I find a great bit of information on something I’m writing about then I will link to it.  If it is rubbish then I will link to something else.  Therefore, the more inbound links a page has then the more likely it is to be a useful page.  That makes it more important.
2. How relevant is the content on the linking page to your page? Is the page that the link is on covering a similar topic?  Indeed is the website itself generally writing on the same topic as your page?  If it is not then your link will carry less value.  There must be relevance.
3. How important is the linking page? How well does the page the link comes from rank itself?  If that page also has a high trust and multiple inbound links to it then it will increase the value of the link to your page.
4. How many people click on that link? Think of each click as a vote.  The more people that follow the link the better.
5. What do those visitors do when they reach your page? Do they stay and read for a while and visit other pages on your site or do they just leave straight away?  If they leave (bounce rate is high) then that will devalue the link too since it is obviously not providing visitors with a good experience.

Turbocharge your links

Ideally you want keywords in the link text.  This will turbocharge your links.  This site is about SEO training, and my main site also has a page on Search Engine Optimisation on it, so linking to it like that makes sense.  It is relevant to this site and provides a further resource for people who want to have their website optimised.  Because I have used the text that I want the page to rank for (in this case “search engine optimisation”) as my link text, I am telling search engines that the page I linked to is important for that phrase.

SuperTurbocharge your links

Don’t forget to add in your title text to your links.  This is another opportunity to tell both humans and search engines more about the page you are linking to.  In this example I have used the text “SEO consultant Wicklow”.  By hovering over the link this text will come up.  The code for doing this is <a href=”http://whatever.ie/whatever” title=”SEO consultant Wicklow”>

Where can I get links to my site?

At some stage every webmaster (that’s what you are if you run a website) runs into the problem of where to get links back to their site.  Here are six ways to get links…

1. Ask for them.  Ask people who run relevant websites to link to your website.  The worst they can say is “no”.
2. Directories.  Submit your site to relevant directories.  Some of these are useless, but some still carry a little weight.
3. Submit Press releases and articles to press release sites and article sites.  Many of these have just been depreciated with the so called Google Panda update, but as a rule of thumb if you can find a suitable site easily it probably has not been affected by the update.
4. Utilise social media.  You will not get a lot in the way of useful links from the sites themselves usually (most have nofollow attributes on their links), but by getting your content out there in the social world there is a higher chance of somebody else reading it and linking to it (organically the way all links should theoretically be made!).  It is also a good PR exercise, so no excuses for not using social media like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Digg etc.
5. Forums.  These really come under the social media category in some ways.  They are of limited use but can sometimes create a good stream of traffic which is never a bad thing.
6. Blog.  This is my favourite way.  Establish a good blog and it will become a resource in itself that will gain in importance.  It is a low cost way of building links for long term gain.  Commenting on somebody elses blog is less useful.  What about doing a guest blog post on someone elses popular blog?

Do NOT do this to get links!

Here are some things you should definitely avoid when building links to your site…..

1. Buying links: This is the number one thing not to do to boost your SEO.  Buying links is bad.  It goes against Google policy and you WILL be penalised for it when you get caught.  Think you won’t?  Trust your competitors not to drop you in it by reporting you when they find out how you got above them in the Google ranks?  Don’t do it.
2. Reciprocal Links: “I’ll give you a link if you give me a link”.  My next post will probably be on Reciprocal links for more information.  The short reason is that you want more links in to your website than out of your site.
3. Pay somebody else to build your links without knowing exactly what they are going to do: It may seem obvious but lots of people pay for others to build their links (I even provide that service myself), but many do not know where those links are going to come from or the methods used in getting them.
4. Go for quantity over quality: Leading on from the last point, you need quality links and quality is harder to get than quantity.  If you have many links from unrelated sites it could lower the level of trust in your site.  If you owned a search engine would you rank sites you trusted lower than sites you didn’t trust?

Link Building is not an exact science.

All your links are not going to be ideal.  What I have done here is give an overview, but there is quite a bit more to it.  There are times to break the rules and times not to.  I have paid for links because of positioning and only on specific, relevant sites.  This has been more to do with gaining traffic through them than what it will do for my own sites Organic Listing SEO.  I have never and will never bulk buy links (I learned from others mistakes there).

If you found this useful then share it!

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Domaining, or the practice of buying other domains for SEO purposes used to be popular.  That was because it worked.  Now though, particularly since it is difficult to get relevant domains as .com, but also because of changes in search engine algorithms domaining is not as effective as it once was.

Brian Cowen Supports Domaining for SEO.... but it's still a good idea. (he may not actually know what I'm talking about)

Does this mean we should all give up on domaining?  Not at all.

Here are 5 reasons why domaining is worth doing.

1. Domain Typos

As an example let’s say I had a site called wortley.com.  Wortley happens to be my surname.  The trouble with it is that hardly anybody on the planet can spell it properly!  In Ireland the most common mis-spelling is Worthley.  So if somebody was to try and find my site, then typing in www.worthley.com would return them precisely nothing.

So if your company name is prone to typo’s then buying similarly named domains that people may type to get to your site makes sense.  You just redirect them to the correct site.

2. Your Company Name Is Often Shortened to Initials or has the word “and” in it, or other confusing letters.

If my company name happened to be Wortley and O’Connor Ltd for some inexplicable reason, then it is not going to be readily obvious what my website is going to be.  Is it woc.com, wortleyoconner.com, wortleyandoconner.com or even wortleyoc.com?

For this reason I will never name a company in this way.  Particularly since nobody can spell Wortley in the first place and the apostrophe in O’Conner sends people into a state of utter confusion.

If I was stuck with that as a company name I would be well advised to get all versions of it though.

3. .com or .ie

If my site was wortley.ie then (assuming people have learned how to spell it) how many people would type in wortley.com first?  A lot.  People assume .com endings.  You may notice that this site does not have the .com version.  You may also be amused to note what happens if you type in http://www.seotraining.com

If you do you will notice that you are redirected to a .org domain.  (probably won’t notice that first though).

If it is possible, then getting the .com, .net, .org and .ie versions of your site makes sense.  One other good reason to do this is that nobody else can come along and set up a near duplicate site to yours.  Imagine if your business is an online shop with a .ie domain name and somebody comes along and sets up the same domain name with a .com ending.  They could make the site similar looking to yours and sell similar products.  You would lose business.

4. Keyword rich domains

If you are in Ireland and do a search for SEO training then you will find that this site comes up at the top of google.  Why is that?  Well the domain name is seotraining.ie, the subject matter is SEO training and generally you will find references to search engine optimisation creeping into nearly every post.

I am using this domain to target those keywords.  My main site http://www.webshed.ie has no reference to seo in the domain name and it would be a lot harder to make it rank for that.

I have heard a lot of “professional SEO consultants” say that it doesn’t work anymore.  Well it does for this site (and a few others I have).  Also I have not put any effort at all into link building to this site.  It is all about the content.

5. Company Rebranding

My last post was about rebranding your website.  If your company is taken over, does a merger or simply wants to rebrand what happens to your website?  You will still have visitors going to the old domains.  You need to redirect that traffic to your new domain.

When starting out on an SEO campaign where do you actually begin? How do you organise and prioritise? What is more important: social media, link building, content?

These questions are valid for everybody. They are particularly relevant if you have been charged with your company’s online marketing and are not 100% sure exactly what to do in order to get results that will get you a clap on the back.

Your SEO campaign needs planning to make you look good.

It all has to start with SEO analysis.  My granny used to knit a lot.  The house was littered with knitting patterns.  Try building a house without blueprints.  The same is true for online marketing and SEO.  Without a clear picture of what has to be done you will end up with a proverbial one armed jumper (an itchy one at that) or a house with architectural properties similar to that of my own (and the builders actually had plans!).

SEO analysis allows you to work out exactly where you stand right now and provides pointers for where you can achieve that all important traffic and Google rankings. Think of an SEO analysis report as an SEO blueprint.  A good SEO analysis report will tell you:

• What keywords am I using currently?
• Is my website standards compliant? (good code base)
• How can my site structure be improved? (for ease of use and for SEO)
• How does my site compare to that of competitors for SEO?
• What keywords are competitors using?
• What sites link back to my site?
• What sites link to my competitors sites?
• What are my sites Strengths, Opportunities, Weaknesses, Threats? (SWOT analysis)

A really good report will also bring in social media and assess what can be done there too.  It will also explain the effects of these different aspects on your websites online performance.

Webshed offer a SEO Health Check that incorporates these features.  That is because it is the essential building block of any online campaign.

If you are about to start an SEO campaign, do not go into it blind.  Have a clear plan based on facts and your life will be made that much easier and there is less possibility of spending lots of time on little return.

Get found online

Getting found online is not all that difficult.  It is not incredibly easy either.  Of course it depends on how much competition you have.  Why do some sites show up above others? On Google it is a combination of over 200 factors!

In general these are split into two types of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – On page (the actual website itself) and Off page (links from other sites to your site).

For On-page SEO all you need to do is follow Googles Webmaster Guidelines.  Although, there is quite a bit to that, and it may take some time and patience to work your way through it.  There are other issues too.  Try looking up information on keyword density for example.  The web is full of different opinions.  The reason that some people will tell you not to exceed 4% density (4 percent of total text on the page) and others 8% density for example, is that nobody knows exactly how many keywords will get your page flagged for keyword stuffing.

Here is the problem…..

You want your site to get found online for specific keywords (SEO training in the case of this blog for example).  In order to show that the site is all about SEO training, it is tempting to use the phrase lots.  However, if I do that, then it will look like I am trying to influence search engines and they will penalise me for it.  This is not to say that it does not work…. but eventually the chances are your site will plummet down the rankings if for keyword stuffing.  I always advise clients to stick to the webmaster guidelines rigidly.

Off site SEO is where a lot of people come unstuck.  How do you get links to your site?  How many links do you need? Should you pay for links? Does it matter where the links come from?

It is a mine field.  Get it wrong and you will pay for it!  Get it right and your site will reap rewards.  By the way NEVER pay for links! It does matter where the links come from too.  What is more, external link building should be something that is an ongoing practice.  I will be posting more on link building in the future.

If you want to get found online, then it really does pay to get somebody who knows what they are doing to either train you, or do it for you.  This saves a lot of time.  Nobody knows it all (the search engines do not release the details of their criteria) but using a SEO professional who has gained experience from spending time on research as well as experimenting and finding out where some of the limits are pays off.

Online Marketing Forum

I have just created a brand new Online Marketing forum on my home site.  It will cover SEO at all levels, online and offline marketing and PR.  That’s just as a starting point.

I observed that while there is a huge interest in the business community regarding SEO and Online Marketing in general, there is a natural reluctance to ask questions to real life people.  I understand this completely.  Nobody likes to appear ill informed.  Social Media and SEO are relatively new fields though.  They are also fields where there is a lot of bad information available online.  Online Branding is a new concept to many businesses, particularly for SME’s.

SEO training and Social Media training are my own preferred areas, but while I can personally add a lot to the forum in these areas, I want people to freely express their own views in all areas.  The forum is to be a free information resource.

My purpose in creating the Online Marketing Forum, was to create an environment where people could ask the “silly questions” with a degree of anonymity.  It should also become a place where professionals can argue the pros and cons of their latest thinking.

The forum is brand new, so therefor it is fairly empty at the moment.  Don’t hold back.  If you are involved in Online Marketing or want to find out more about it then join it.  Post a question, comment or hypothesis.  This is a resource for you.  This is a free resource and while it is hosted on the Webshed site, I hope that it will be populated by professionals in competing companies as well as my own.

Directories are now about as much use for SEO as a telephone book

The internet is full of directories, and full of people offering services to include your site in all those directories.  They are of little use for SEO today, certainly when compared to Social Media as an SEO tool.

Going back just a few years businesses were going mad about directories.  Online budgets were being spent on premium placements and button and banner advertising.  Things change however.  Directories no longer hold the same power.  Google have even said that they will not be placing as much emphasis on dmoz (the mother of all directories).  This is because many sections are without editors and there has been widespread criticism of some editors.  It is something I noticed myself.  It can be extremely difficult to get a site listed on dmoz.  At best it can take months.

Am I saying not to bother with directories and to concentrate instead on Social Media?

Not quite.  When it comes to Google Local, the map results for businesses, local directories seem to hold some weight.  This is because Google is slow to trust submissions to Google Maps by businesses.  If the business address given on your contact page is the same as that listed in various local directories then it builds that all important trust.  It also helps to identify you as an actual local business.

The links from directories still hold some weight too, depending of course on the directory.  They just don’t help your SEO as much as they once did.

For my money, I’d rather invest in SEO training and in particular Social Media training than on expensive banner advertising on directories.

Niche directories are probably more useful than general directories now too.  This is because nobody really uses directories to find sites any more.  Search engines are just fine for that.  A niche directory however will get you targeted, specific results, and probably ranks better for whatever it is you are searching for than a generalist directory.  A good niche directory will hold information on the field too, rather than just being a list of businesses/ websites.

By the way, don’t bother with paid directory inclusion services, they are likely to do more harm than good!

In the last post I was discussing PPC budgets.  It is easy to think of PPC as the only thing to be included in online marketing budgets, but that is not giving the full picture.  This site is all about SEO training.  Some think of SEO and PPC as being interchangeable.  They are in reality two quite separate topics.

SEO can be seen as a gamble by companies when compared to PPC

I found some stats the other day about budget spends on SEO/SEM(PPC).  The results were quite startling.  In general, over 85% of an online spend is on PPC ads, most notably Google Adwords.  This leaves less than 15% of the budget allocated to SEO.  In this instance, when I refer to SEO I am talking about organic Search Engine Optimisation.

This doesn’t seem like a big deal until you realise that only 14-16% of clicks on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) are actually on the Pay Per Click ads.

Why are so many companies spending such a high proportion of their online marketing budget on something that only yields 14-16% of return?  Why are they not concentrating on trying to get a larger slice of the 85% or so clicks that are coming from “natural” listings?

The truth is that most companies have tried.  However, only some can be successful, because of the limited number of top positions.  For the sake of the argument, let us assume that success is your site appearing on the first page of results.  Let us factor in normal company politics and in particular the accountants. What is going to happen?

Well firstly, somebody, either from Marketing or from IT is going to mention that some work needs to be done on the companies web presence.  Discussion will take place about what needs to be done.  The answer will be “SEO, and we can try some adwords too”.  The accountants will hear, we need to do some “ghrjldjfsdkhf” and we can try some “alkjwonjaef” too.

It needs to be explained.  SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation.  It’s about getting the website up the ranks of google.  Adwords are online ads, where you only pay for each click – as little as 8 cents.

“OK, how much is SEO? Can’t the IT dept do that?”

Ah, but the truth is they have probably already tried.  They may even have had some success and claimed that it is not possible to do much better because of company size, the level of competition, the sun being in aquarius etc.  Put on the spot the only recourse is to offer that SEO is an expert area that requires dedicated consultants to push the site even further. (quite true really).

“Ok, so how much does a consultant cost?…”

“How much?????? And what results will they give us.”

Here they are going to be told that nobody can actually 100% guarantee results.

Let’s sum up.  You can have a fully budgeted spend on adwords, where you can measure results and ROI with ease, or you can spend what seems like a lot of money on an SEO consultant (compared with 8c per click) and have no guaranteed result.

What has been forgotten is that approximately 85% of your potential clicks are coming from the SEO work… not the adwords campaign.  Further more, once the bulk of your initial SEO work is done, so is the bulk of the expense.  Adwords keep charging as long as you need them.  SEO can be dropped for short periods of time without the same total loss of revenue.

Invest in SEO training and your IT staff can maintain and even improve your rankings on their own without the need for massive ongoing spends.

I am not against PPC.  Budgeting 85% of your online spend on adwords is not actually sound financial sense though.  It is aiming for catching a minnow instead of a tuna fish, and the spend is not exactly different over time either.

If you are spending 85% of your online budget on adwords, then your online marketing budget is wrong!

Pay per click advertising, (the ads that appear at the side of your search results) has really taken off in Ireland.  The internet is still a relatively fresh market place in Ireland.  Indeed some businesses still do not have a website today.  With all new technologies it can be difficult to ascertain what is reasonable budgeting.  What will give a ROI and what will drain the budget resources?

PPC advertising was gaining momentum in Ireland.  However, with the onset of the recession, we saw spends decreasing.  How do we know that spends were decreasing radically?  The bid prices fell dramatically.  So too did adsense revenues.

What is the difference between Google Adwords and Google Adsense?  If you are an advertiser then you are using Adwords.  If you display google ads on your site (like the ones on this site) then you are using adsense.  Every time one of you clicks on an ad on this site I get a few cents.  Pre recession, the revenue from these adsense ads was much higher.

All of this points to a lowered pay per click (ppc) spend.  Interestingly though some companies actually chose to increase their adwords budget.  With reduced competition and lowered costs it made / makes sense.

How much should you budget for with Adwords advertising?

The easiest way to find out is to set a budget that you are comfortable with and then see how far that gets you.  It really depends on how much competition there is for the keywords you are targeting.  The higher the competition, the higher your bid will have to be.  This can sometimes be ludicrously high.  If you are paying $5 – $8 per click then you are wasting a lot of money in my opinion.  I don’t like to ever spend more than $2 per click.  In fact, I am more comfortable around the 50 cents mark.  There are other factors to figure out too, before you spend a fortune on adwords.

How many click throughs are converting to sales?

Your Website really needs to be set up to make money out of visitors you are actually paying for.  If you are getting clicks from your adwords campaign, but are not seeing a boost in revenue then you are doing something wrong.  The landing page needs a call to action.  If it is a single product, give them a big buy button. If it is a shopping site of some kind then get them to register.  If you can get an email address you can give occasional reminders about your site.  Most people visit a site up to 5 times before making a purchase.  Your websites greatest focus should be on converting visitors to sales.  This is true of services too.  If you do not interact with your visitors they will go elsewhere.

Some of you will be thinking that there is no call to action on this site, so what am I talking about?  There is the RSS feed, which is gaining more subscribers every day.  There are also links to my main site sprinkled throughout the blog.  I link from relevant topics to relevant pages on the main site.  In this instance, because the post is about Search Engine Marketing or SEM which is the umbrella term for PPC and related advertising, you will see links like the previous one on PPC.  This helps my SEO and leads to more relevant information.

So, in short, if your conversion rates are low, then you are spending unnecessarily.

Why pay for a professional to do my Adwords advertising for me?

The short answer is that professionals have more experience with Adwords and can actually save you money on your advertising campaign.  Of course you can learn it yourself, but that is taking focus away from the core of your business and it will take you time and money to learn.

You will always retain control over our own Pay Per Click budget in either case.  Online marketing budgets need not only take PPC ads into consideration.  I’ll be discussing Online Marketing budgets further in the next post.

Be My Valentine ... Google

With Valentines day fast approaching I started thinking about what is wrong with how we think about SEO and Google in particular.

With SEO training Google tends to be the main focus with clients.  They want to climb the Google ranks.  That is because in many ways Google is the only search engine that matters.  However, romancing Google is not how we should view SEO.

Saying “be my valentine” to Google is much akin to saying “be my valentine” to your sweethearts mother.  You will not get the girl/guy by focusing your affections on their mother.  You will get the cold shoulder.

In SEO circles there is much talk of getting some Google love. But Google doesn’t love.  Google rewards the love that others give you.  They reward the relationships you build with other users.  Google are blatantly open about this.  The first three Google webmaster guidelines for content and design deal with making your site easy to navigate, easy to find (sitemap) and creating useful and information rich pages.  In other words they are telling us that we should create websites for people and not search engines.

Our focus should not be on romancing Google, but on romancing visitors and other webmasters (all of whom are human).  Of course you have to keep your would be mother in law happy too.  There is no harm in being charming with Google, but the way to Google’s affections is to concentrate on your content and your visitors.

Unlike most mothers I know, Google is quite happy to see you “sowing your wild oats” with as many people, across as many sites as possible.  Rather than utter “be my valentine” to just one user, it pays to shout it out with gay abandon across the entire universe that is the internet.

If your heart is true (your content is fantastic), you will attract the affections (links) of users across the world.  Human nature being what it is, more links means more visitors.  Charisma is infectious.  Once you gain the affections of some of your users more will come, just because you appear popular.  It’s just like in school, when people want to be associated with the “in’ crowd.  They put effort into getting close to them, creating links with them and boosting themselves through association.  So what have the “in” crowd got in internet terms?  Nothing more than great content.

What makes great content is another discussion entirely.

Don’t be my valentine Google.  I prefer humans to algorithms.

What relationship does link positioning on external sites have with the effectiveness of a link for delivering results to your site? (I’m just going to stop for a breather after that horrible sentence… the rest will be better… honest)

Some would argue that links are links and you take them where you can get them.  Surely though it is smarter to try and get links that are actually worth something to your site – particularly if you were about to part with cash for them.  Onwards with our SEO training – Lets take a look at how the position of the link on the external site can have an effect on how effective the link is for you and your SEO.

It is important to note that positioning is just one element in the SEO equation.  We will look at others in future posts.

Link Positioning for SEO

Banner and button links: Google does not like paid links.  Banner, Skyscraper and button links are images.  This in itself is not bad.  There is little difference between a text link and alt text in a link.

What is bad is that the positioning of these elements is just about always the same on a site.  Worse still they often come with “Sponsored links” or some other such text in their vicinity.  That is like painting yourself yellow, wearing nothing but a pink tutu, and running past Google buildings shouting “I paid for a link” while a team push flyers with the details into the hands of everybody entering or leaving the building.   Obviously it’s the algorithms you have to worry about mainly (unless you get a personal review). A link to another site from a banner is therefore only worth the number of clicks you get from it.  Add in “ad blindness” and paying for a banner ad seems to make little sense in most cases.

In truth it probably won’t do you too much harm to buy button or banner ads, but it’s not likely to do you as much good as you would like in terms of SERPS.  That said, a nice banner ad on a popular and related site could get you enough click throughs to make it worthwhile.

Footer Links: This is one for you web designers.  You put your links onto every page you design…. in the footer.  It doesn’t do you any good.  Well, it doesn’t do you any good compared to having a nice link in the middle of the page copy.  The footer is also another place where advertising is often placed.  In short, don’t expect much from footer links – they do not work well.

Header Links: Links in the header are not a lot of use either, for much the same reasons.  In general the only links you ever see in headers are paid advertising.  The search engines know it.

Positioning in the source code structure: When your page is crawled, it is the source file that will be read.  Traditionally, important content would be placed as high up that code structure as possible.  This is because crawlers used to only crawl a proportion of each page.  Using CSS you can float the main column rather than the side bar, thus it is closer to the start of your code.  It is still worth doing this for other search engines, but not necessary for Google any more.  Google can understand your page layout (providing you keep to reasonable standards).  Thus positioning in the source code is not as important as positioning on the page.

Best position on the page for a link: I love in-text links.  I think that a good relevant link in the middle of a paragraph of relevant text is the bees knees.

Surrounding Text: What about the text surrounding a link?  I think that the surrounding text is quite important.  It helps to show context and is simply a way of telling dumb machines that it is less likely to be a spam link.

Blogrolls and other Site-wide links: It depends on the site, but having the same link on every page of a site is often not as good as a few links on relevant pages.  Firstly, Site-wide links may be confused with advertising, secondly, in my experience they are just not as good in many cases.  So, if somebody offers to put you in their blogroll, ask them for a link in a few individual blogs instead.  You can ask for a few, because it will probably seem to them like they are giving you something less important.  Get some blogging training and start making great quality links for yourself.

The ideal place for a link on an external site: The perfect link position in my book is in the center of the page (in the main body of text), as near as possible to the top of the page, with relevant surrounding text and good keyword use.

Links are less useful if:-

• The link is in the header or footer sections of the page.
• The link is in a list of unrelated links.
• The page is badly formed (broken source code)
• The link is in Javascript
• It is an image link that has no alt text (makes it nearly entirely useless)

When it comes to training someone on link building, there are a lot of factors that go into what makes a good link.  The page positioning on the external site is just one of the factors that play a role in how effective your SEO is.

Search engine optimisation relies on a wide range of factors (there are over 200 elements taken into account by Google when analysing a page).  The wonderful thing about SEO is that even by paying attention to just a few you can make a positive change to your site.