Having a beautiful website, or a stellar portfolio will not help you rank better in Google if your Search Engine Optimization is not done well. Sitemaps, alt tags, and keywords – to name just a few – are extremely important to Google, Yahoo, and Bing to measure how important and how helpful our website’s content is, rank accordingly. It isn’t important to understand the SEO terms described in some articles, as long as you learn SEO and implement the methods correctly as per the latest Google updates.
Defining Search Engine Optimization aka SEO
With the help of search engine optimization, organic traffic to your website is increased via organic search results on search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. A website that appears higher in the Bing or Google search results will attract more visitors from the search engines without spending on PPC Ads Campaigns.
Without buying PPC Ads management or affordable digital marketing packages, you can try several other methods to get website traffic, by making your website positioned on top of Yahoo or Google search results. The following is a list of 10 tips that we think are absolutely crucial, and they are no particular order to follow!
1. How to use the keywords effectively for better SEO?
An important SEO tactic is the placement of keywords throughout your page. When making decisions about what products or services you offer, you should assume that someone will search for information about them using the keywords for which they would use. It’s important, however, to avoid adding too many keywords, especially if they’re unrelated, this can result in your site being considered spam. Don’t forget, keyword stuffing is ignored by today’s search engine spiders.
2. Optimize URL Structure
URLs are one of the first factors a search engine uses to determine a page’s topic relevance, so it’s crucial to make the URLs easy for search engines to find, read and understand. Keep the URL short, relevant to the page’s topic and keywords, and ensure that the URL helps categorize the pages of the website as well. Optimizing the URLs will also enhance the overall user experience.
3. Meta titles of the web pages
In addition to appearing at the top of the browser, Google and other search engines like Yahoo and Bing show a page’s title tag as a heading for the search results. Search engine’s spiders and website users see these title tags on the page to get an idea of what it is about. In Google’s search engine results, they display about 50 – 60 characters in title tags, so keep your descriptions brief, compelling and relevant. As a rule of thumb, topics and keywords should be prominently displayed.
4. Using ALT tag to make use of images
Be creative while adding keywords and keyphrases to the description section of the images and videos that are used on your website. These descriptions are known as “alternative text tags” or technically “ALT tags”. Your image and video ALT tags, as well as general text content, found throughout your website, allowing search engines to understand your web page’s topic relevance, with the help of the properly used keywords or key phrases. In turn, using the ALT tag, whenever possible, will increase the chances of your site being found and increasing its ranking in Bing or Google’s search results.
5. Stop using Flash and upgrade your website immediately
Flash websites were very popular in the 2000s and some users have forgotten to update the website to the newer platforms. Many small businesses built their websites in Flash, due to its price and ease of use. Flash-based sites are always ranked lower by Google than those run on alternative platforms mostly because they cannot understand the relevancy of the content of flash pages. Your search engine ranking will rise dramatically if you switch your Flash-based site to WordPress. Please check out our Web Design Packages for affordable options.
6. Make your website mobile-friendly
A mobile-friendly website is more likely to rank high in Yahoo or Google search results as it is estimated, 40% of organic traffic in 2019 came from smartphones and tablets. Google is ultimately concerned with delivering a seamless user experience. The better your website feels and performs for users, the higher your website rankings in Google will be.
7. Understanding Sitemaps
An effective sitemap is a list of links to all the major web pages on your website to allow search spiders to locate pages more quickly, and more relevantly, for the particular search. Each page of your website is thus easier to find and can be easily accessed with fewer clicks, both by spiders and website users.
8. Publish new content frequently
You probably already do this regularly, but still, remember…it’s a must! Content that is regularly updated is considered to be a good indicator of relevance. Keep it fresh at all times.
9. Monitor the whole SEO Progress
If you don’t keep track of your position on search engines for the optimized keywords, you won’t know if all your SEO efforts are paying off. Use tools such as ‘Ahrefs’ or the ‘Google Search Console to monitor the rank of your pages. Apart from monitoring the search engine rankings, it’s a good practice to use ‘Google Analytics to keep track of your “referrer log” to see the source of the traffic and if in case of search traffic, what “search terms” visitors type to find your website on search results.
10. Boost the number of backlinks using whitehat tactics
Organic and quality inbound backlinks play a major role in Google’s algorithm when it comes to rank a website in a search engine. In this way, Google takes into consideration how many times your website has been mentioned by third parties when ranking your website’s authority, reliability and relevance. The quality and the source of the inbound backlinks must therefore be closely monitored…regularly.
Here’s a link on how to find the right search engine optimization company if you’re interested. Read Affordable SEO services for more information on our Search Engine Optimization services for small businesses.
