SEO Basics: Essentials For Website Optimization
- September 26, 2019
To explain SEO, for a moment imagine your website was a cake, to make a cake requires core ingredients. Consider the backlinks, paid search, and social media leads as the icing, but the content, architecture, content management system and infrastructure are the sugar, eggs and flour that makes the cake. Without the core ingredients, your cake is tasteless, boring, and ends up in the trash.
Optimizing for Search Engines
Search engines are required to do their jobs as fast as possible. By referring users to websites and content that is the most relevant to the user’s search. There are few factors to determine to return relevant search:
Content: Content is king. Search engines love sites with relevant contents.
Site Speed: Site speed is important to users and web crawlers.
Authority: Does your site have quality inbound links, quality content to link to? User Experience: Is your website responsive? Is your site easy to navigate around? Does it have a high bounce rate?[irp]
Keywords
Your SEO keywords are the words or phrases users would use to find your business online. Optimizing your website/pages for the right keywords is vital. Optimized website for search engines speaks the same language as its potential visitor.
Social Signals
Social signals are the likes, shares, tweets, or views, people, place on social media platforms. These signals filter out to the various search engines.
Social signals is a sign that your brand is being talked about by users, which leads to improved SERP ranking.
Responsive Website
Users could be accessing your site from any device ranging from mobile to tablet and desktop. It is mandatory that your website is offering the same user experience to all users regardless of the platform they are using. You need to ensure your website is responsive to all user platforms.
Focusing on Meta Data
Metadata is the text that appears on search engine result pages (SERP) when a website comes up for certain keywords. This includes the title of the page and its meta description (descriptive text below the title). All web contents should have title tags and meta descriptions. Your meta data is important as it gives users a preview of your site.
Meta description: This should be unique and page specific as it displays preview snippets for a given page.
Meta Title: This is a web page title, and shown to users in SERPs. It is also visible at the top of the web page once a user visits your site.[irp]
When setting up or managing a website ensure, the website is optimized for SEO, and always follow best practices. Ignoring the basics of SEO will only leave your site’s foundation a mess and prevent you from fully maximizing revenue opportunities.
