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Search engine optimization is a tactic that has created an unexpected boom in the digital market sector. What once used to be inserting a few keywords became a hugely complex field with constant algorithm updates and reforms.
The focus of SEO agencies and professionals is to increase the ranking of a website on a search engine, preferably getting it on the first page results. The competition in the SEO field is quite heated, but understanding the main concepts of SEO and applying them isn’t hard.
To help you understand the most important SEO basics to rank your website, we’ll provide some help below.
Available and Secure Website
The very foundations of any SEO strategy entail having a working secure website. Search engines use crawlers or search bots to find websites to be able to rank them. If those bots are unable to find your website, it won’t be listed on the search engines at all or, at most, have minimal visibility.
The URL is the main element you should work on if you want to ensure that the search engine bots can easily find and identify your URL. To properly create a good URL, you’ll need to make sure that your website is properly coded, in addition to having a robot.txt file that informs the search engine how to look up your site’s info and a proper sitemap that includes all the pages available on your website.
Building Backlinks
Backlinks have been used as a major indicator of a site’s helpfulness for many years. Since you have already spent time and resources to be able to come up with content for your website, it’d be a waste if you don’t properly promote it. As mentioned by professional SEO marketers at SEO Jet, backlink management software can help you analyze your competition’s links and increase outreach opportunities.
Backlinks aren’t just a way to help you rank higher up the results page, but also helps in improving your reputation, so you could become a trusted source of information or content. A backlink is a link on a different website that promotes your website. As you can guess, search engines use and investigate backlinks to know whether your website is helpful to others. According to Google, backlinks are amongst the top 3 ranking factors.
Loading Speed
The loading speed of a website plays a very important role in how search engines rank a website. The reason search engines hold the website’s speed in such high regard is because visitors also do. According to numerous researches, visitors are going to leave your website and look for another with the same information if they have to wait more than 3-4 seconds for it to load.
The slow loading speed can become very troublesome as you begin to observe the bounce rates of visitors. Search engines take into consideration the user experience and optimization of websites, especially if they’ll be recommending your website to users by placing it on the first page.
Mobile-Friendliness
Around 10 years ago, a website that wasn’t optimized to be used by mobile devices didn’t suffer a lot in terms of traffic or popularity. But nowadays, you can forget about ever ranking on the first page of a search engine if your website isn’t properly optimized to be accessed through mobile phones.
Search engines take mobile-friendliness very seriously as a ranking factor because more than half of online users are using mobile phones to access the internet. If your website isn’t fully functional on a smartphone, Google will rank it down, not to mention that the people who visit it aren’t going to stay on it for long.
Google has updated its algorithm to lean more towards favoring mobile-optimized websites rather than websites designed for desktop computers only. This means that functional mobile websites are going to get more traffic because Google will display them first. You should make sure that your website checks all the boxes when it comes to a few important elements.
- Resolution on the website automatically resizes to fit any mobile screen
- Optimize the fonts to be read on small screens
- Readily available menus for better navigation
- Keep ads away from the main information
Keyword Research
It’s important to understand what you’re optimizing your website to rank for before you begin doing it. Keyword research will help you focus on the right terms people use to find websites of similar content to yours. To be able to settle on the proper keywords you need to take into account a few considerations.
Search Volume
This is what you should first find out about before you begin your process. Search volume is the number of people searching for a keyword. If the volume is too large, then you’ll be fighting with a lot of competition to come out on top; too small volumes translate to no traffic. So, it’s important to find the right balance to be able to use the right keywords.
Relevancy
Since you can choose any keyword you want, the relevancy of the keyword is a critical factor in your keyword research. You’ll need to think out of the box and avoid generic keywords if you’re trying to be relevant. For example, settling for marketing software as opposed to enterprise PPC software won’t do you any favors because you’ll be competing with thousands of bigger companies.
Create Content for Your Audience to Market
Websites that are linked to and shared on social media are known to rank higher. It’s very important to create content specifically geared towards your audience, in addition to having qualities that make it shareable. This will hinge on you being able to identify the exact niche your audience is looking for, which you’ve probably done before you created the website. This time, try thinking like your audience and ask yourself about the content you’d share if you were them.
While SEO is directly responsible for the amount of traffic you get, it can also help you convert visitors to customers or recurring visitors. The constant updating of search engines’ algorithms made sure that truly helpful and well-done websites get to the top of the results’ page. This is why SEO became responsible for a whole myriad of things that ensures that a website is truly ready to be beneficial for the audience.
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