I’ve been asked quite a few times about the SEO vs PPC. First of all, to the uninitiated, I’ll explain the difference. If you already know the difference between SEO & PPC then you can skip this bit.

Organic Google Search Results

The organic search results are the results on the left under the block of three paid results which you’ll usually see first (unless their are no ads for the search term, which is unusual):

Organic results are the free results, and results are shown in accordance with Google’s search results algorithm which is designed to allow the best, most valuable & most relevant content for any given search term, to rise to the top.

Paid Google Search Results, AKA Google Adwords, Pay Per Click, PPC

The paid results, PPC (Pay Per Click), are the results you see at the top of each page, and on the right hand side:

You get your website into the paid search results with Google Adwords, and the results are ordered by the adwords algorithm which takes a number of things into account including bid amount, click through rates & quality score (which aims to rank the quality and relevance of the landing page).

So there you go, if you weren’t sure of the difference, hopefully this simple explanation has helped.

SEO vs PPC

So which should you focus on, which is best, SEO or PPC, which would win in a fight??

I’m kind of biased because although I do have quite a bit of experience with PPC, organic SEO is my forte’ & my passion – so I’m inclined to say that SEO is best, but the truth is that it’s a case of “horses for courses”, i.e. it just depends.

The first thing I will say about PPC, is that many, many businesses are pouring good money down the drain with it! PPC is a fantastic tool if used right, if used wrong it’s a quick way to lose all your money & see zero return, and from my experience, most businesses use it wrong. But I’ll get to that shortly.

In terms of which is best, it really depends on your business, and your website.

I’ll back up a little bit first and talk about website function. All business websites should be thought of (in my opinion) not as “websites” but as business tools. All business websites are tools, but they need to do different things for different businesses. If you’re selling online, then your website is an online selling tool – if you’re not selling online but you’re generating enquiries online, then your website is an enquiry generation tool. If you’re booking appointments for your sales team with your website, then your website is an appintment booking tool, if you’re building an email marketing list with your website, then it’s a list building tool (and you then use broadcasts to your list to convert to sales / signups / sales / enquiries) , if you’re doing a number of different things with your site, then your website is a Swiss army knife

One of the mistakes that many (most) businesses make (and not only small businesses) is that they do not properly identify what kind of a tool their website needs to be, and then when it comes to marketing they apply the wrong kinds of marketing strategies, and the website marketing is doomed from the outset.

So what kind of a tool does your website need to be?

If you’re a traditional offline business, and you do not sell products or services online, then your website is either going to be an enquiry generation tool or an list building tool. If you sell products or services online, then your website is a direct sales tool.

It’s all about being able to track conversion. The better you’re able to track the conversion & the return on investment, the more practical it becomes to be able to safely invest in PPC marketing. You can track conversion very easily with direct sales websites, Ecommerce websites – but it’s not so easy to track conversion & returns with enquiry generation & list building websites, so it’s harder to ensure that you’re making a profit from PPC with these kinds of websites.

Direct sales tools work great with PPC – they work well with organic SEO too – but the great thing about PPC is that you can generate sales straight away (if you do it right.) The reason direct sales tools are great to use with PPC, is that as you’re paying for the traffic you need to be able to measure the return, and with direct online sales you can measure the return very effectively, as long as you have conversion tracking set up (which is a must), then you can see straight away what return you’re making from SEO, and if you’re not making a profit you can tweak accordingly, and test & measure until you’re seeing great results. SEO is great for direct selling websites also, and you can set up conversion tracking with Google anayltics so you can see which search terms are bringing a return via organic search. But organic search can take some time, so if you have some budget for PPC, I’d advise that you start with PPC to get some traffic going, and then use the data you generate from PPC (i.e which search terms are bringing the best returns) to then begin your organic SEO campaign to generate organic traffic for the search terms which are bringing the most profit.

Enquiry generation & list building websites can be tricky when it comes to PPC, for the reason that the website isn’t directly converting the sale, so you can’t work out a direct return. It could be that you think PPC is generating sales, but actually your sales are coming from other marketing avenues & you would do better  cutting the PPC & investing into the other area which is actually bringing the sales (i.e. SEO or offline marketing methods).

Lets say that you have an average profit per sale (of a product or service) of $100, for example. If you’re selling online, it’s very easy to  see that if you have an average sales conversion rate of 1%, and you’re paying $0.50 per click, you’re paying $50 to make $100.  So with online sales you can carefully track conversions, and drop any terms which are costing too much or which aren’t converting. Even if you’re not making any return, at leas you know this & you can act accordingly.

But when you’re not selling online, it’s harder to work out your exact conversion rate, as the sale is converted via a process which can’t be tracked online. Well actually, it can be, there are some tools available now which can convert from ppc traffic through to telephone enquiries, but they’re not particularly cheap & they’re fairly complex to set up & run properly.

I’ve had direct experience of this – years ago I had an offline business, with a website which did have some online selling but it was mainly an enquiry generation website, I was pumping money into adwords just assuming that this was where a chunk of the sales were coming form as it seemed to increase as I put more cash into PPC, but one day I decided to pause the PPC campaign, and I discovered that it made no difference at all to sales, and that in fact the sales were coming in mainly via organic SEO and some offline marketing I’d done – figuring this out saved me about a thousand dollars per month, and if I’d known this 18 months earlier….

Don’t get me wrong – PPC can be fantastic, and there are people making a LOT of profit from it – but equally there are some businesses wasting money on PPC, either just because they’re not using conversion tracking, or because their website is an enquiry generation tool so they cannot figure out whether they’re making a profit from PPC marketing.

When PPC started out, you could get onto page one with google adwords for pennies per click, now however it’s got so popular that many search terms have expensive minimum page one bid amounts, many of which are higher than $0.50 per click, some which are $1 per click or considerably more. Average online sales conversion is usually somewhere between 0.25% – 1%, which means you need between 100 and 400 clicks in order to make a sale, so lets work this out:

If you’re paying an average of $0.50 per click, the cost of sale is between  $50 – $200. So if your average profit per sale is $20 – OOPS!! If you’re paying an average of $1.50 per click, the cost of sale with an average conversion rate is $150 – $600.

This may seem steep, but this is the issue many have when it comes to PPC, they don’t have high enough conversion rates, and/or high enough average profit per sale.

If you’re making a couple of grand per sale, then you’re probably safe as your profit level will cover the cost of sale even if you’re paying a fairly high PPC & your conversion rate isn’t amazing, but if you’re only making tens of dollars per sale, then you can see that it’s not going to be very easy to make money via PPC.

So, PPC is good for direct sales sites, and particularly good for high profit sales, but you need to be able to track conversion & profit.

SEO on the other hand is good for enquiry sites, and list generation, because you’re not paying per click – so if you get to page one for a search term which is performing, then you have a traffic generation system which will feed your enquiry generation or list building website, without having to continually pay for the traffic.

There you go, hopefully this has given you a better understanding of SEO vs PPC

I’m here in the sunny (it actually is today!) United kingdom, quite a bit of the traffic to my SEO blog comes from the states, Australia, India, various parts of Europe & various other parts of the world – but I can see that some visitors are reaching my blog by searches related to SEO united kingdom, UK, GB etc.

I’m assuming that while some people may be tying to find out if there’s a different way to approach SEO in the UK, I think probably most of these searches relate to business people searching for SEO services here in the UK.

If you do have a question relating to what is the difference between SEO in the US or anywhere else, and SEO in the United Kingdom, there’s only really one major difference, here we spell it optimisation, not optimization . Other than that, the search terms are often slightly different, there are spelling differences, differences in competition levels – which are usually counter balanced by differences in search volume.

I’m not going to plug my SEO services – due to the fact that I very rarely take on SEO clients now, I’ve just got too much going on, with my business website design business, and SEO consultancy for a few key clients with whom I’ve been working for several years in some cases –  I take on the odd new SEO client by referral, usually as a favour more than anything else, but I don’t really have the time or inclination to take on lots of SEO clients – I only have one pair of hands, and they’re quite busy.  I do enjoy writing about this stuff, which is why I blog when I have a spare few minutes (I type fast!), but I do this because I enjoy it, I’m not really looking to further my career in any way with my SEO blog.

So – anyway, there you go, a little – possibly pointless but nevertheless quite enjoyable (for me, anyway!) post about SEO United Kingdom

As you’re probably aware, content is king when it comes to SEO. Many people forget this, or probably they try to ignore it & hope it’ll go away, and that they’ll find a way to get great search engine rankings without great SEO content writing, because it’s time consuming. If you’ve been searching for SEO magic bullets – I can say from experience that you won’t find one – and if you try to omit great unique content from your plan, then I would put money on your plan not working too well.

Once people realise that despite their best efforts, they’re unable to find anything to do away with the need for unique content – the next thing many try (speaking from experience…) is inexpensive content. The old rule – you get what you pay for – is true when it comes to content. What I have found is that cheap SEO content is flawed in one or more ways, either it’s not unique at all, or it’s badly written, I’ve had some articles delivered which just don’t make any sense, quite often Indian content writers & others for whom English isn’t the first language, while it may be grammatically brilliant in some cases, what I often find is that it just just doesn’t read in the way that English speakers are used to. I know some people don’t believe that articles need to be well written, or need to make perfect sense, or need to be enjoyable to read – as many are of the opinion that content – especially when it’s for article submitting, is for marketing purposes & not for readers, but personally I think it makes sense to focus on creating content which you are proud to distribute,  produce content for visitors first, SEO second. I believe that if you stay focused on quality over SEO score, focus on creating content which your visitors will like – you’re investing very, very soundly – yet if you’re pumping out poor content, you may just be treading water, and as Google continue to become even more intelligent in the way that they allow the cream to rise to the top, I’m confident that if you take my advise – in the long term you’ll find it was worth it.

What you have to remember is that all of Google’s algorithm is designed to allow the cream to rise & the crap to fall – if you generally focus on making your site the cream, rather than trying to pass off junk as cream and hoping it’ll rise – then in the longterm I cannot see how you can fail. In terms of SEO that is, and traffic – that isn’t to say that this guarantees that your business will make a profit – which brings me to another point that I’ll take up more in a future post – being sure that your SEO efforts are not all for nothing. There are websites which are doing great for SEO, which will never make money – don’t forget that SEO is just a way to get traffic, you need to make sure that your website converts visitors into customers.

So to conclude this post – I would recommend that you either write your own content, or that you hire great, experienced content writers. This will cost you, but its an investment, as quality content is what you need – in fact, a decent SEO content writer will probably cost you roughly ten times what you can get cheap lesser quality content writer to write content for, but in my opinion it’s worth it for a great content writer, as a well researched, well written article or page of content is far, far more valuable than a cheap, poor quality page of content.

Last night I wrote a short post about search terms – I cut it short when I realised it was close to 2 AM…. oops, I love blogging, get carried awway sometimes! Anyway, who needs sleep??  Anyway, I started talking about the importance of keyword research, and I promised I’d write a more in depth post, so here we go.

Google & the other search engines, are not like the old phone directories, where you go to a category and scroll alphabetically – they’re search driven (you know this of course, you’re not stupid, but I just want to make this analogy to make it easier for some people to understand the importance of search terms).

So because search engines give results only to searches – there is no such thing as “getting to the top of Google” – unless you understand WHAT it is that you’re getting to the top of Google for.

This makes getting to the top of Google COMPLETELY POINTLESS – in certain cases – and ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL in other cases.

If you’re at the top of Google for a search which your potential clients do not search for – then it’s completely pointless – yet getting to page one of Google (and other search engines, but Google is by far more important than the others, in my humble opinion) is absolutely essential if you’re to get business from your website.

So, hopefully if you were confused at first, you’re now starting to see what I’m getting at.

If a SEO sales firm phones you & says “We can guarantee you page one ranking on google for xxx per month!!!” you can reply “OK great, sign me up – now, my keywords are : make money, SEO, lose weight, online casino, when will I be top of Google??” At which point they’ll probably hang up on you, realizing you possible no more about the subject than they do (and I’m not talking about ALL SEO telesales people, but many are just given a patter to follow.)

I have previously known clients who have paid money to so called SEO companies who claimed to guarantee them page one ranking, without ever even discussing with the client which search terms they were guaranteeing page one ranking for – how is that even possible? One such client, when I looked into it for them & advised accordingly, the client wrote to the company, and the company wrote a letter back proving that they were in fact on page one of Google….. FOR THEIR OWN COMPANY NAME…. since they were the only company with this company name, of course they were on page one of Google for the term, but this would have happened by default anyway without any optimization work being required, and in terms of new business, it’s completely pointless, seing as only folk who already knew the business would be searching for the business name, so where’s the potential for new business from a page one ranking for your own company name? Crazy!!

So it’s all about search terms. Sometimes we say “keywords” but really search terms or search phrase, or keyword phrase is a better description, as most of the time we’re wanting to rank for a string of two or more words, not just one word.

So you need to be found at the top of Google for the search terms that your potential clients are typing into Google when they want your products or services.

Lets say you’re a plumber, and you’re in Birmingham – then you’ll be focussing on terms like “plumber in Birmingham”, “plumbers in Birmingham”, “plumbers Birmingham”, “emergency plumber in Birmingham”, etc., be careful about making quick judgements about which are the most important search terms though, as you may well be wrong (most people are when they make assumptions about which search terms they need to be focusing on ranking highly for). For example, you may be right about the search term that you have assumed to be the best one in terms of volume & relevance, but it may be that this search term is way too competitive for your website right now – for example, if your website is new, and the other sites on page one for that search term are all very well established websites with hundreds or thousands of web pages, and hundreds or thousands of backlinks, then it’s not practical to expect it to be quick or easy – or affordable, to gain page one ranking.

This is where keyword research comes in – proper keyword research gives you a list of relevant search terms, with search volumes & approx competition levels – from here you can research further to find out how competitive page one is for each term, and see which relevant terms with traffic appear to be practical terms to be able to rank on page one for in the not too distant future.

Good keyword research is an absolute must – in my opinion, if you’ve not got well researched keyword data – you shouldn’t waste your time with SEO at all! It amazes me just how many businesses – including some fairly large companies, go into SEO without proper keyword research, it just doesn’t make any sense – and in my experience it’s one of the most common reasons for businesses not to get the kinds of returns they expect from their websites.

So – go do some keyword research!! I’ll write another post in the near future about how to do keyword research step by step. Hit control & D to bookmark the blog, and call back in a few days.

Yeah, of course you want to be found on top in Google, but for what?

I’ve been asked this so many times, “How do I get found at the top of Google?” and I’m often met with confusion when I reply “for what search term?”

Sometimes I’ll say “for which terms?” – and I get the reply “I just wanna be found on Google”

Many people reading this will be saying “durr, you don’t say….” but equally, there seem to be many folk out there, some of them very successful business people, who just don’t get this search term thing – so if that’s you, then read this.

Very simple – you need to be found on Google for what your potential customers are searching for. If you sell zipple ding dong window plier sealers (which I doubt you do, as I just made that up), then that’s what you want to be found page one of Google for. If someone phones you & says “pay me  xxx per month and I guarantee you page one Google rankings” – put your card away, until they commit to ranking you on page one for specific agreed search terms.

Keyword research is very, very important – it can make or break a website. I’ll write another more in depth post about this another day, probably tomorrow – I’ve just realised it’s nearly 3 AM, and I should sleep!! Night…

So you’ve heard all this talk about Google Panda, and how it’s been effecting some rankings etc – here’s a huge secret for you….ignore it!

Yup, you heard me – if you’re doing business on the web, then you really don’t need to be getting bogged down with all of the intricate details of what Google is doing every five minutes – don’t worry about it, just stick to good old fashioned SEO & website marketing tactics, and make your website as high quality as possible, and that’s really all you need to worry about.

I started doing this web marketing stuff  in my late teens, I’m 35 this year – and guess what, I don’t pay all that much attention to what’s going on, the latest algorithm updates, latest pagerank updates, Google Panda, bla bla bla – it all means very, very little if you’re focusing on  creating great websites, focusing on quality, and old fashioned SEO – good keyword research, quality original content, great onpage SEO (page titles, descriptions, header tags, alt image tags, etc), and common sense organic offpage (backlinking).

Many web marketers waste so much time worrying about what’s going on at Google – aghhhh, someone at Google broke wind I’d better change my strategy…. really, doesn’t matter – unless of course you’re trying to cheat by getting poor quality sites to rank well on Google, with auto duplicate content etc – in which case, good look with that, but you’d probably be better in the longrun just focusing on making the web a better place by building great quality sites with great quality unique content.

Some time ago I had a “debate” with a backlinker, who was offering backlink packages via a popular web marketing forum – I was pretty sure that it wasn’t a good idea to start off backlinking too quickly for a brand new site, or fairly new website, with thousands of backlinks within a short period of time. It just doesn’t look organic to Google for this to happen, it looks off – especially if most of the backlinks are from low quality, low pagerank sites, and all with the same anchor text (for the uninitiated: anchor text means link text, instead of “click here”, the hyper link is a search term, so if you want to rank for “dentist new york city” then the link text, aka anchor text, would be  ”dentist new york city”).

So I decided to test it, I selected three of my test websites, 2 of which were already starting to get towards page one, and guess what – SLAP, down into the murky depths they went!! This was almost a year ago, and they’re still bogged down – I haven’t done anything to rescue them, but it shows that too much too soon in terms of backlinking, really can kick a website down the Google rankings.

The backlinker never replied when I let him know that it appeared I was right, funny that!

The moral of the story, is ORGANIC. Do things which look natural – I’m not saying don’t hire someone to do backlinking for a new site, but don’t go mad in terms of volume. In my opinion, if you want to invest in some backlinking with a new site, the best bet is to aim for decent authority sites, higher quality lower quantity. Paid backlinking is fine too, as long as it’s not obvious paid backlinking.

OK I’d better qualify what I’ve just said, as I have been annoying people for ages talking about how paid backlinking isn’t a good thing…

A few years ago Google messed about with things & found a way to figure out if linkjuice was being sold, i.e. if a website appeared to be giving a link which passed linkjuice (the nofollow attribute not being applied to the link) only because they were being paid to do so, and with little thoughts to the quality of the site – then this site would be blocked from being able to pass linkjuice.

This saw lots of sites that had got rankings through paid backlinks, dropping like flies! There was a big controversy, lots of very annoyed people.

So it’s not that paid backlinks are banned, or that you’ll get a google slap from buying a backlink – it’s that Google block sites from passing linkjuice (or un-trust them all together) if they’re selling links without any real quality control.

There are some directories which Google trust to sell backlinks while keeping a close eye on quality – but there are many more that they don’t, because lets face it – when you’re selling backlinks, money talks.

So you can do some research and invest in backlinks in trusted directories etc., but I think one of the best bets is to target great authority websites which match your niche perfectly, which get lots of traffic – and which don’t appear to sell backlinks – and phone them, build up some rapport with them, and ask if you can purchase an ad with them – and ask them if they’ll make sure that your desired anchor text is used in the ad, and that the nofollow attribute (or any other way of achieving the same thing) isn’t used, so that it’s good for your SEO too. Be open about it, let them know that you hope to see a return by direct traffic from their site, and also some SEO benefit. Better still if you can come to some joint venture agreement which means you don’t have to pay for it – but chances are if they have a great authority website, they’ll want some money from you.

Hope this helps

Hands up if you get phone calls from SEO marketing companies……

Notice I have bolded the term above, as I’m trying to point our the destinction between SEO companies and SEO marketing companies.

There are firms out there flogging the heck out of the phones – with call centres packed full of people trying to hit their targets for either closing deals online or setting appointments – they were doing this years ago with various things, some of them slightly scammy – some completely scammy (some were closed down & prosecuted, even some fairly large organisations that were using telesales to peddle scams. In the UK we had the business rate reduction scam – wow that was a good one, and although you can say it was very naughty – and eventually proven to be illegal – you’ve got to also admit that what these people did was clever too. They were selling nothing – nothing at all – and making brilliant money from it. That is, they were offering a service which they weren’t actually offering – or which differed a great deal from that which was offered – but it was fairly difficult for anyone to find out, which was why these scams were picked, as people could make a fortune out of them for years before they were shut down.

Now – SEO & SEM, is a perfect are for this kind of marketing brain – in fact with the birth of SEO and PPC I am quite sure that some people wept with joy when they figured out just how perfect it was for them. You see, with SEO & SEM, its very easy for marketing companies to sell a service very very well based on telling a customer what they want to hear – with very little chance of being shut down for not providing what is being offered, unlike with other markets.

Now this isn’t at all an insinuation that all of the SEO marketing companies who’re conducting telesales operations, are  actually providing a service which is any less than that which they’re proposing to sell – but some certainly are, and they’re doing it remarkably well.

The point is, if you think a SEO company hasn’t done a good job – or hasn’t done what they’re contractually obliged to do – how do you prove it? It is very difficult in many cases to even clearly define the service that the company has undertaken to provide.

For instance, if you pay a company xxx per month for SEO services, and you don’t think they’ve done enough because you see no results in terms of traffic – but the company can show that your website is  no1 of Google for your company name, and page one of google for some obscure terms which relate only to your company – and which may have been positions that your website had attained without their involvement – how can you prove that they haven’t then provided a good service, and unless you have it in writing exactly what services the company will provide for the given money (x number of article, x amount of backlinking, etc.,) then you’ll find it very difficult to prove that an SEO company is in the wrong.  This can be fustrating, for example of you shelled out a few grand over the period of 6-12 months, to only see that you’re ranking on page one for terms which bring you no traffic, but this doesn’t prove that the company did anything wrong.

So for this reason, what I would suggest is that you learn to see that there are SEO companies, and there are SEO marketing companies – and there are SEO marketing companies which do a lot more marketing (of their own service) than they do actual optimisation service for their clients.

Personally, I would ask a lot of questions of an SEO company using telesales tactics – if they’re a professional SEO company, why are they not practicing what they preach, why are they having to resort to cold calling in order to make sales? This isn’t always right though, I’ve had a couple of calls from true SEO companies – but you can usually tell by asking some questions, if you start talking even slightly technical, and you start to panic the caller, then it’s obvious you’re talking to a telesales person & not an SEO person, and if it’s a a telesales person that’s calling you to sell you something he’s clearly not all that clued up on, then I would be slightly dubious.

One near trick to separate true SEO companies from SEO marketing companies, is to tell the caller that you’re knowledgeable about SEO and you’d like to ask them some questions, including seeing some proof of their ability to rank their clients highly for quality, relevant search terms – if you never hear from them again, then you know that you scared them off, if they are quick to come back with impressive data, then maybe you’ve found a true optimisation company that know their stuff, in which case, great!

I recently received this question from Ben:

“hey,

So can you tell me how to get higher up on Google? Do I need to pay for a listing in the paid google thing or? Is that not linked? Someone phoned me and said they’d get me higher up (think they said either number one or page one) within 30 days or my money back. Should I do something like that, pay some one, or what? Advise would be gr8, thanks. Ben P.”

Here’s my answer:

Hi Ben, thanks for the question.

First of all, you’re asking the right question BUT it needs extending slightly… It’s great that you recognize that you don’t just need to be on Google, but that you need to focus on being found higher up on Google, this is something that many new to Google don’t quite get at first – but what I mean about extending the question – is that you need to know how to get higher for your targeted search terms, not just get higher in general. So, first you need to know which search terms you’re targeting & then you need to work on getting your web pages (your home page and sub pages) higher up in the Google organic results.

So the first thing, is keyword research – I’m always going on about this, but it’s because it’s so important & it’s a step that most people miss completely. You need a list of search terms that you’re going to work on getting onto page one of Google, and this isn’t just a case of having a list of relevant terms, you need to know how competitive each term is, and how much targetted traffic there is available for each term, and whether it’s likely to be a buying term or a tyre kicking term, so that you end up with a list of terms that you’ll get a return from. If you focus on terms which are too competitive, it’ll take you ages to see any return, if at all – if you focus on terms which have no traffic, you’ll be wasting your time – if you focus mainly on terms which will bring researchers & tyre kickers & not buyers, you’ll be wasting your efforts – so proper keyword research is hugely important.

Once you have your search term data, you need to create unique content – and focus on quality. Don’t try to get PLR articles, duplicate content, spun content, scraped content, cheap content writers who’ll pump out tonnes of low quality content for very little, or you’ll be wasting your time – just focus on quality. Don’t worry too much about quantity to begin with, just go for quality, and steadily add more great content, content which people will find helpful and informative, this kind of content will naturally bring more visitors & backlinks, offline word of mouth & other good stuff – and most importantly, this kind of valuable high quality unique content which adds value to the internet, is what Google want, and is what they want to push to the top for relevant search terms – that’s what their ranking systems are intended to do!

Next important step is to ensure you understand the basic elements of good on-page SEO, page titles, search engine friendly URLs, meta descriptions, alt image tags, H1, H2, H3 tags, internal link anchor text, no follow on certain links to keep link juice in more important areas, etc etc – all this stuff is fairly simple, just so some reading & get some understanding & improve it as you go along.

Then – offpage SEO, which means backlinks.  Actually, the better quality your website is in terms of quality & quantity of unique content with good on-page SEO, and the better job you’ve done of targeting the right search terms in terms of being appropriately competitive, the less you really need to worry about offpage SEO.  There are lots of things you can do to get backlinks, article marketing, directory submitting, blog commenting (not SPAM commenting but actual valuable replies to relevant blog posts), social bookmarking, guest blogging, joint ventures / backlink swapping, buying backlinks (I wouldn’t recommend buying online, but instead phoning or emailing particularly high quality websites which have great content which is very relevant to you, contact them to see if they’ll feature your website due to your high quality content – if they won’t then offer to advertise in return for the backlink) – I don’t recommend paying online for backlinks, it can be tricky to ensure that you’re actually getting any value for money, read my post about paid backlinks.

Thanks again for your question, and I hope this answers your question on how to get higher up on Google.