Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of improving your website’s ranking in “organic” search results produced by sites like Google.
Higher-ranking sites will, on average, receive more traffic to their pages and, as a result, potentially more business. The goal is to get to page one, preferably position one, but whether or not that is attainable depends significantly on the market.
If you’re in the mobile phone or travel space, you’ll be fighting a losing battle unless you have a significant budget to invest. If you’re selling a niche product or service in a specific geographic place, however, if you’re patient and follow these easy guidelines, you’ll have a good chance of making it to page one.
Content containing a large number of keywords
Search engines like Google and Microsoft (Bing) use “spiders” as one of the essential strategies for calculating your rankings. A spider is a computer program that crawls the internet in an organized and automated manner. They examine your (and everyone else’s) website to determine the type of copy on each page, as well as essential terms and phrases. This information is used to calculate your site’s relevancy when someone puts a keyword or phrase into Google, Bing, or any other search engine.
With this in mind, consider your target audience’s search habits and ensure that the terms they would use to find your company are mirrored on your websites. For example, if you provide physiotherapy services, your website content should include words or phrases people would look up to, such as “massage” or “lower backache.” Remember that spiders can’t read the text in photos, but they can read alternate text related to the images, so you might want to rethink the layout of some of your pages.
The Google AdWords keyword tool is a free tool that can help you determine what keywords to use. This is meant to help potential advertisers find the most relevant terms for their target demographic, but it can also be helpful when writing website copy.
Once you’ve decided on your keywords, double-check that they appear in the body of your pages as well as in the metadata, which is the unseen data that spiders use to learn about your website. If you have a basic understanding of HTML and access to your server, you can do it yourself, or your site designer can do it for you.
Linking
PageRank is a ten-point grade given to your website based on inbound and outbound connections. It helps search engines determine how trustworthy your website is. “Link juice” is passed along when sites link to one other, which means that if a place links to your site with a high PageRank, link juice will be passed on to your site, enhancing your rating.
While you may not always be able to control the number of visitors who come to your site (and Google frowns on link farms and other artificial linking tactics), you can take steps to improve your PageRank score. Ensure that your site is linked from your social network activity, particularly Google+, and aim to get listed on free open directories such as DMOZ or professional organizations in your field.
Both outbound and internal links are critical. Whenever you cite a website or a source, make sure to include a reference and a hyperlink. Internal links should be carefully considered to increase the number of time spiders spend on your site. To ensure that every page on your site has a connection to every other page on your site, you might want to reconsider your menu arrangement or add a quick links footer.
To find out your site’s PageRank is, you can use a browser plugin like PageRank Status for Google Chrome.
Make sure it’s up to date
The frequency with which search engine spiders crawl your site is impacted by how frequently the content on your pages changes. To ensure that your content is maintained up to date, you might wish to make altering text, photographs, or adding or removing pages a monthly obligation.
Create a blog on your website instead, and dedicate time each day (or week) to producing or curating helpful information for your target group. This may appear onerous or daunting at first, but it will become second nature once you get into the habit, and it should only take around half an hour per day. Use Google Alerts to stay up to date with internet stuff that fits your keywords, which should always be cited for reference material.
It’s critical to stay on top of SEO
As Google and Microsoft seek to provide more accurate search results, their algorithms for deciding the order of their results are constantly modified and improved. As a result, SEO is a dynamic field in which being current pays off. However, these essential principles are unlikely to change significantly because they are significant predictors of your ranking.