SEO has become a familiar term among internet marketers today. And why shouldn’t it! It’s a great strategy for sculpting your website and your marketing plans in the most optimized manner. This enables marketers to fetch high quality organic traffic from the search engines to your website.
A few years ago, the world assumed SEO to be associated with shady characters working in dim-lit rooms trying to con search engines to achieve higher web page rankings. Thankfully, those days are long gone. Things have changed and become increasingly practical, making the internet more sensible with each passing day.
Nowadays tricking search engines by trying to stuff keywords or pay for links to your site, can get you penalized right away. To that effect it may get you on the infamous hit-list as a “black-hat” SEO practitioner, which by the way, you wouldn’t want!
This blog will give you valuable insights of Search Engine Optimization that will help boost your site’s web authority as per the current Digital Marketing scenario. All in all, the visibility and value of your business might get amplified if you implement the below-mentioned tips.
Figure out what search engines want
If you want to learn the smart SEO practices, you first need to understand the goals of the search engine companies. In order to attract more and more people to return to the search engines for fetching data, companies like Google and Yahoo endeavour to showcase the best quality-driven results for any searched keyword.
Makes sense now, doesn’t it?
Therefore make sure that your SEO strategy:
- Ensures that your websites’ pages have the best quality content associated with the keywords related to your site.
- Ensures that Search engine giants such as Google and Yahoo believe in the above point with respect to your web content.
A question that might enter your mind here is, “what exactly is high-quality content?”
Here is one way to define high quality content.
High-quality content can be comprehended as data which imparts valuable and unique information. Something which fulfills the purpose of a user’s online search. In other words, high-quality content may not only be restricted to textual data, but also incorporates plenty of images, infographics, pie charts, graphs etc which make it easy for the user to look out for relevant data as per their search queries. For instance, if a user searches for SEO on the search engines, he gets redirected to SERP(Search Engine Result Pages) which displays content that is most relevant as per the search query.
We will discuss about quality content in more detail in the latter half of this blog.
The purpose is to impart knowledge, that makes logical sense.
With time, Google and other search engine giants have evolved into revolutionary entities encompassing the capability of understanding, and measuring the relevance of online content. While evaluating the overall user experience. You can go through Google’s quality guidelines which are always handy while understanding what exactly a quality website should be like.
If fetching data from your website is good for your visitors, it’s even better for your search rankings.
A quality user experience is quintessential
An exquisite website reflects a sense of swiftness and dynamicity in its user interface. It should be an important concern for an SEO practitioner to make sure their site is reputable and well-expressed. The website should be free from bugs, spam or malware, and must function flawlessly, thereby giving a first-hand user experience.
Overpopulated advertisements on your site and excessive links with irrelevant information clearly state that a site is not reputable. So in a nutshell, any kind of deceptive practices can reflect an underlying black hat SEO practice and categorize the website as an unfavorable one. To know more about website dynamics, register with Google Webmaster tools so that you get notified every time there is any issue pertaining to your website.
Speed is good
Speed can also be a good way to evaluate a site’s quality. Obviously, a fast site gives a better user experience. Nobody likes to have to wait while on the internet (almost 40% of online traffic halts for an average of 2 seconds on a web page), everyone is seeking speedy internet usage. Hence a faster site gives better conversions too.
There are tools such as Alexa Site Audit, My Site Auditor which help crawl websites and figure out pages that are slow due to bugs and errors. And eventually, they help fix them.
Mobile friendliness = Higher rankings + Respect
Now that Google has announced Mobile friendliness as a ranking factor, the internet has started to modify itself in keeping with the technological advancements. People have started to use the internet more on mobile phones and other portable devices because they make work, communication and entertainment very convenient and swift.
Hence, sites which are mobile-optimized fetch better rankings from search engine companies, which is a good sign of days to come indeed.
Be fresh and keep updating data
Don’t be static when it comes to content and design. Freshness can also be counted as another major ranking factor. If your site is all static with barely any data getting updated on a timely basis, the site stagnates.This is definitely a cause for concern for your website. So buckle up and do some necessary revamping!
Quality Content Period
Quality content can be defined as information which is unique, original, written clearly, and relevant to the user’s search query. It’s definitely hard to create high-quality content. Hence, adequate research and expertise play a critical role while developing high-quality content.
You should ensure that your web pages are focused on individual topics rather than individual keywords. What is required is the appropriate inclusion of the keywords and phrases that synchronize well within the content, so that these keywords get fetched every time someone looks out for information similar to what you are providing on a search engine.
Coming to a very crucial aspect of SEOㅡ Keyword Research. And yes there is a technique to this!
Before being decisive about a keyword pertaining to a page on your website, there are a few questions that you should keep in mind, like:
What sorts of keywords can a person use while they search for data relevant to your business/product/service?
What sorts of keywords are currently driving traffic to your website?
What’s the frequency of people using these keywords?
There are various SEO tools available online that help with a lot of SEO techniques such as keyword detection, backlink detection etc. Moz and many other online brands offer similar tools which come quite handy while doing SEO.
Using them will help you to be more optimized and accurate when it comes to more effective SEO. Better research drives better results!