We get a lot of questions about SEO and were planning on doing a blog post on it. Serendipitously we connected with Emma Miller from Australia who is writing on the topic. So we’re going to try something different and let Emma answer some of the most common SEO questions in her own words.
Needless to say, the quality of your website has a great influence on your business results. However, your website has the same needs as the products and services you’re offering. Unless you let the world know about them, you won’t be making any money. The same thing applies to your website. If you don’t design and set it up in a way that makes it easy to find, you won’t be recording enough traffic.
So, what is it that you need to know when it comes to making your website attractive, relevant and efficient? To begin with, you should know that Google’s algorithm is constantly changing, which means that whatever was given priority last year may no longer be the most important factor. You need to be on top of things when it comes to the key SEO factors that will help you achieve your objectives. Let’s take a look at some that are currently the most important.
Long ago, websites would simply stuff their content with keywords, but that’s no longer an option. Instead, the focus is now on using keyword phrases as naturally as possible, predicting how they would be typed in the search bar. Choosing the phrase is the first step and you should try to be as specific as possible in relation to your offer, but at the same time it should not sound like and ad.
Naturally, you can’t expect to be the first who has focused on those particular keywords, which makes the beginning of every SEO campaign extremely difficult.
One way to tackle this problem would be to focus on long tail keywords, which will allow you to publish as much content with those keywords as possible. These phrases of more than two words usually take you to very specific niches, which means there’s less competition.
You wouldn’t be the first one to think of simply reposting same texts, but that’s just a horrible idea. By doing that you risk facing copyright infringement, which might have legal consequences, but you would also ruin your site’s ranking because of duplicated content.
There are tools that can help you check if your site has duplicate content in case you have some doubts. Also, creating original content that is, at the same time informative, relevant and attractive is the most important thing.
Links have been playing an increasingly important role in the ranking. Basically, a page with more links has more flow and ranks higher in search engine results. For example, creating many links to your contact page(s) will occupy most of your site’s PageRank flow.
What you need to do is run a diagnostic tool for auditing your site’s navigation first. When you discover what pages are drawing a lot of inbound links, but they themselves have very little content, you should include a noindex meta tag in the HTML code and Google will omit that page from its search. You should do the same with any other page that might have duplicate content, such as tag archives. If this is too much for you, you can always hire an expert for this task.
Title tags and meta descriptions are the two things that are still important when it comes to SEO. Title tags have maintained their importance, i.e. the importance of being neither too long, nor too short, while meta descriptions are no longer that influential when it comes to page ranking. Still, creating captivating content for them is what will attract people to clink on your link in the search results page.
Of course, there are more elements that comprise a page and affect its ranking, such as H1 tags, ads, images, formatting and content length, which means that there are quite a few items that need monitoring and adjusting. If you have an app, this also applies, especially for features like automation for app messages.
Everyone’s talking about a study that showed that Amazon would lose more than $1.5 billion a year if its pages loaded just one second more slowly. A lot of people simply don’t have the patience to wait for a page to load, which means you need to make sure your site loads as fast as possible.
Again, there are IT support services and various tools which can tell you exactly how long it takes for your site to load and you can use the feedback to optimise the elements that are slowing it down.
URLs
Organizing your URLs properly is quite important. They should reflect the hierarchy of the information on your page, which helps search engines categorize the page better. Ideally, an URL should clearly state what the content is all about, which increases relevance, as opposed to an URL which contains a series of alphanumerical symbols that say nothing about the content.
As you can see, there are quite a few things that need to be done properly if you want to make the most of your website. Even if you don’t have much experience with designing and maintaining websites, there is still stuff you can do on your own, but it would probably make sense to hire someone who’s been doing it for many years.
However, the fact that you probably won’t be doing something, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know exactly what needs to be done and why. That’s the reason you should try to understand as much as possible about the elements that influence page ranking.
Having this knowledge about the contemporary trends will be invaluable when you decide to hire an individual or a company and put them in charge of your online presence, since no one will be able to trick you and offer a solution which would be counterproductive or outdated. After all, your website is the door through which all you clients enter the realm of your company and you need to make sure they don’t get lost, and help them find what they want as easily and quickly as possible.
Emma Miller is a Sydney based writer with a degree in marketing. Interested in digital marketing, social media, start-ups and latest trends. She’s a contributor at Bizzmark blog. You can follow her on Facebook and Twitter for her latest updates!