White Label SEO for Public Relations Agency Clients

It is useful to keep in mind that Google wants to deliver the best possible result to users first time - otherwise they might start using competitor search engines. The best way to think of what search engines are trying to do is to remember that their algorithms are attempting to emulate human behaviors. You want to make sure your course content is better written and more comprehensive than your competition as this will give you the best chance of ranking above them in search.

Everyone knows that it is important to rank highly in Google - but just how important is it?
Numerous studies have shown that the number one position receives between 30% and 40% of click throughs, and up to 70% of clicks are for the top three positions. Looking outside of the raw statistics, there are additional reasons that you should be looking to rank highly.

• A high ranking implies your client's organisation and services are popular and of excellent quality
• For people that don't have a specific brand or product in mind, a top ranking gives your client a greater chance of getting shortlisted
• People only click until they get the result they are after - so if the top result does the job, the other results are unlikely to be selected

Links are used by all search engines as "votes" for a website and its content, and are known as "backlinks" in SEO world. The process that search engines use to measure the value of backlinks has got more complex over the last few years as they develop new ways to ensure the best pages rank in their results. Search engines use a number of criteria to measure the influence of a backlink including the context, relevance and strength of the referring website. These include:

• Context: was the link editorially given by the referring website, or was it placed by the receipient?
• Relevance: is the link from a website that is an authority in the receipient's area?
• Strength: How well does the referring website rank, both generally, and for the same keywords you are looking to rank for?

Of course websites such as the BBC might not be specialists in your clients niche, but they are so powerful that their relevance is not so important as they are trusted by the search engines, and links from this type of site are very powerful (and hard to come by).

The words that you have on each of your webpages are crucial to ensuring that they rank well in search results. Great content makes everything else - from gaining links to being indexed and ranked correctly by Google - easier. Make sure you understand what your users want, and provide it to them in an easily found and read fashion.

A Google penalty will cause pages (or even your whole website) to drop down the search rankings. This can happen for a variety of reasons, which generally fall into two categories: bad content and bad links. Bad content: Webpages with little in the way of original content or not much in the way of content are liable to be flagged as low quality and rank poorly. If you have too many low quality pages your whole website can be penalised. Bad backlinks: A website with an excessive number of bad quality backlinks or links with excessive non-branded anchor text is liable to gain a link-based ranking penalty. Again these can apply to specific pages only, or, in most cases, the whole website.

Organic search refers to the main search results and generally there will be ten results. Organic search rankings are earned by impressing Googles algorithms with a well designed website, great content, and lots of other good websites endorsing your website by linking to it. Paid search can be split into two main areas, text and display adverts.

• Text adverts are those that show up at the top and right hand side of Google search results and are generally paid for on a pay per click basis
• Display adverts show up on other websites as you surf and generally have a graphical element to them. They are served to you as you will have shown an interest in the product before and a cookie has been dropped into your browser to identify you.

One of the greatest advantages of paid advertising is that you choose when and who to show the adverts to, and you can reach your audience instantly without having to build up the SEO authority of your website. This is also a weakness - once you have turned off the tap you lose your ability to gain traffic and potential students. While effective, paid search campaigns can prove to be expensive if you are relying solely on paid search to reach customers. One of the main advantages of organic search rankings is that once you have invested in the content and links to get you up the rankings you will stay there for a long period of time - in many ways organic SEO is the gift that keeps on giving and once you are in a good position you generally just have to maintain that position, and can cut down on your SEO investment over time.