If you have an online website for your business or blog, then you may have heard of a three-letter acronym, “SEO.” It stands for Search Engine Optimization which is being practiced by many website owners to increase website traffic fast. Whether you have a site to showcase your products online or you have a personal blog to influence a lot of people, you need to get traffic to your website free as much as you could. And with that, you need to understand how SEO works.
But, many people avoid SEO because it seems complicated and difficult to understand. Also add the fact that search engines such as google, bing, yahoo, etc., always make updates with their algorithms. However, you need to know that the benefits of getting to know SEO are undoubtedly worth all the effort that you’ll invest.
If you’re patient and eager enough to know SEO, then you’re on the right track because we will help you master the process of SEO by providing you with everything that you need to know such as its fundamentals, tools that you’ll need, and jargon that comprises SEO.
See The Big Picture
Before you start to customize your site to incorporate it into SEO, the first thing you need to do is to be able to see the big picture of it. What is the ultimate goal of SEO? From its last word, optimization, it aims to modify your site to get higher rankings compared to other competitors in the same industry in different search engines. How to increase organic traffic to the website? How does it work? There are many ways to how you can increase your site’s rankings, but the two main principles are increasing its authority and relevance. The authority of your website depends on how search engines such as Google see your trustworthiness that your site is of quality. They measure it based on how you create your content, number of inbound links, brand mentions, and different measuring systems. While relevance is how search engines see your site as appropriate for a specific inquiry, you can increase your relevance by how you build your content and with the right keywords.
What Is “Long Tail” And “Head”
Another thing to know before you go full steam ahead to upgrading your site is to decide whether your site is a “long tail” or a “head.” A “head” site aims for a broad market which is in higher demand than “long tail” sites because it uses common terms or keywords that are searched frequently in a day in search engines. It uses 2-3 words that makes it less specific and shorter than “long tail” keywords. For example, if your target is to have a high volume of organic traffic generation and whether they’re interested or not in what you offer is not an issue, then you use head short keyword phrases like “pet grooming” or “air-conditioning maintenance.”
A “long tail” site, on the other hand, uses keywords which can be more than three words and are more specific to target a specific audience. This is because people tend to search specifically for their items by putting the exact product plus its location for convenience. For example, if your site offers several products in different areas or you tackle different topics, you can use more keywords so that your site can gain traffic that is of high quality who are mostly interested in what services or products you may offer. Keywords like “Pet grooming services in Manhattan” or “air-condition maintenance in Texas” are an example of long tail keywords.
How To Properly Create Your Content
The next thing you need to do is to focus on how you create your content. Having the proper content in your sites is one of the top influences to increase your rankings in search engines. Whenever you craft original content, it takes you ahead of other competitors. However, one should take note that when other sites to republish yours, Google and other search engines may think that you are not the primary content owner and in return will affect your website negatively. You also need to focus on the structure of your contents, how you choose your titles, picking catchy subheadings, or having a good introduction, which is all themed to your keywords are also measured by Google. Learn how to incorporate catchy titles that are search engine friendly.
Inbound Links And Domain Authority
As stated earlier, one of the measurements of search engines to decide who gets on top of the list is based primarily on authority. There are two kinds of it, domain authority and page authority. Page authority is page-specific, and you can use this as a strategy to favor some of your pages than others to get higher authority. While Moz specifically measures domain authority according to the number of inbound links in your site.
What are inbound links? An inbound link or backlink is when a particular site hyperlinks a page in your website or your entire website. Remember that it’s not just any site it also needs to be coming from high authority and reputable site. There are many ways how you can increase your inbound links, but one way to do it is by creating great content that other sites can’t resist to link you. The more inbound links you have, the higher the domain authority you’ll have.
Analysis and Adjustments
Creating unique content, using the right keywords, getting inbound links, don’t necessarily mean that you will be getting high rankings on search engines right away. It’s a constant process where you need to analyze results and be ready to make adjustments or upgrades. Add the fact that search engines regularly change their algorithms on how they measure site rankings. You should be able to adapt to changes and keep your website up to date. You need to learn how to keep track of your data such as traffic growth, keyword rankings, the growth of your backlinks, etc.
There are available SEO tools online like Google analytics, SEMrush, SE Ranking, Ahref’s backlink checker, Moz Pro, etc.that you can either buy or use free ones that offer the necessary or complete tools you need. SEO is like a scientific process where you experiment, observe, interpret, and make changes to get the perfect results. In this way, you can find new strategies and improve your SEO as you move your way to the top.
Good read: What Is Organic SEO? What Are Its Benefits And How Do You Do It?
Next Level: Technical SEO
If you already get the hang of adequately handling your content creation and link building, you can get to a new level of challenge, and it’s called technical SEO. Sure, the name itself can easily intimidate you, but if you’re willing to take your website into the next level and create a strong foundation, you can definitely get to understand SEO technique. It doesn’t necessarily need that you take a course on website programming or website development; all you need is patience and the will to learn.
Here are some of the elements of technical SEO:
- Website Speed: refers to how long it takes for your page to display its contents entirely. Every user always wants to get things done faster. You can minimize the time it takes for your site to load by keeping your template simple like choosing minimalist designs, adjusting the size of your images and using jpg formats for pictures and png formats for graphics, or limiting your redirects.
- Website Architecture: How you build and style your website as a whole can also make it SEO friendly. It’s like creating a house and designing it in a way that is presentable and clean. Using the secure protocol HTTPS or arranging your website by having a navigation guide called “breadcrumbs” is how you build a good architecture for your site. Another way to do it is URL Structuring. A URL is the address of your website or a particular page in it. You can change your URL to give a brief description of your content. Setting up your URLs correctly describing what your content has and not with a bunch of random numbers and symbols is a significant boost for your site.
- Mobile Friendly: Consumers use their mobile phones in searching for products or services that they need. So search engines such as Google started to include measuring the mobile-friendliness of a website in making their rankings. So your site’s display and composition must be mobile friendly. You can make your website mobile friendly by adjusting your font sizes and styles, including visual content, adding a meta-viewport tag in your mobile site configurations, etc.
- Duplicate Content: Your website can be prone to errors such as duplicate content. Search engines don’t want spammy sites that have the same content over and over. You can detect if your website has duplicate content by going to the Google search console, search “google search console” then look for appearance and then HTML improvements to see if something needs to be fixed. If you encounter a duplicate content, you can delete it entirely or just rephrase it so that you’ll prevent losing contents.
Conclusion
With reading this ultimate guide and with the knowledge and skills that you have, you’ll be able to gain more traffic with doing SEO for your website. Gaining more traffic means, more potential customers thus more profit for your business.
