In our digital world, regardless of your business’s niche, you need to have a website.
Whether it is for internet marketing, to sell your products, or for simply truth to say, your website is the face of your business. A lot of companies hire web designers, then after the site is created they sit and wait for the hits without optimising any keywords, meta titles or descriptions.
What many don’t realize is that this is just the beginning. Your website is just the first part of a larger whole of marketing, getting your business seen by potential customers. After your website is complete, you still have to keep your site visible, so viewers will not just hit the enter button. This is when SEO comes into play.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a term to describe a process a successful internet marketer goes through to make his/her site get listed on top of search engine results. Such things include link building, inbound links, and keyword research. When engaging in SEO, you effectively get the customer to your site with relevant content. If such is the case, then you will have won the SEO game.
In order to explore the possibilities of compelling traffic to your website through search engine results, it is best to be armed with the knowledge of the different ways in which search engines tailor their results to their users. There are several things that any SEO Company will look at when describing its services to you.
Search Engines… What They All Look For
Your site may be performing well in SERPs, but if the search engines cannot find it, then it is not going to get ranked. Therefore, it is extremely important for web designers to adhere to the letter and the spirit of search engine listings to get ranked.
What are the main ranking factors?
In SEO, we often refer to ‘ranking factors’. This describes the condition which needs to be optimised in order to boost your rankings:
- Loading time – Everything on your site should load faster. If your average load time is more than fifty seconds, you need to evaluate a few aspects of your site. First is your graphic design and whether or not you used web graphics, request for a web design render. Next are your web pages engaging quality content, easy navigation, and what is the fullest functionality of your site. In addition, it is important to be able to understand what your keyword competition is looking for.
- Link building – It is everything else that links to your site from another site. Google uses inbound links as votes of confidence to determine the credibility of your site. That means that inbound links are like a popularity contest and the more you have, the more relevant and likeable your site is seen by Google. You can often get sites to link on your site by providing quality content that people will want to link on. This can be accomplished by writing a Think Money post or a guest post for another popular blog and emailing the author.
- Meta descriptions – It is that short description of your site that appears on the search engine results. This needs to compel people to click on your site when they are on the result page and the description has to compel them to click.
- Title tags – The title of your website will be the first thing that people will be able to find your site by, so choose the wisely chosen keywords. When Google is determining the relevance of your site, the keywords will be featured on the title of your website as well. Title tag is catchy and describes your web page well; you can improve your search results page ranking by making your title tag search engine friendly.
- Google trends – You can help Google by staying up on the latest SEO news. By subscribing to some of the industry newsletters, you can stay current with the methods that are gaining traction with Google.
- Keyword research – Search engines look for keywords and phrases. The closer your keywords and phrases are to the top of the page, the better. While optimising your content for specific keywords will help, merely increasing the number of words on the page will not improve your search results. Well writing articles with more content does help improve your search results.
- Text structure – Text should be clearly structured and organised. There should be one main headline (H1) and several sub-headlines (H3 and H4) to break up the text. This is because search engines will review text in a way that shows the main headline and secondary headlines predominantly.
- Multimedia content – Having graphics and pictures in the text structure is a more recent way to boost your SEO. This is because readers stay longer on the page while engaging with the multimedia content.
Prior to becoming an online article writer for Technical Writers, Cooper took the opportunity to explore the digital marketing world with a range of academic and training courses. His first hand experience within the tech industry, in addition to his degree in English Literature, cemented his career in creating content regarding all things marketing and technology.