Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the focus put on optimizing your website to improve its ranking on large search engines organic results.
In order to be able to do this though, you have to have a general idea about what your target market searches for, how the search engines rank websites, and what content will get the best results for you.
Even though most of the time things with the online world move extremely fast and things change often, the basic tenets of SEO remain the same.
Here are 5 SEO tips that every business should implement right now.
Target Your Content Toward People Over Machines
This is first on the list because, ultimately, humans are your target market and not machines. Yes, you do want your content to be favoured by search engines, but there won’t be any point in that if there is no audience eager to engage with what you have to offer.
Base your material on subjects you know your audience is interested in. When you write about topics that people are asking questions about, your site will naturally see an increase in activity, and search engines will recognize this.
There is more value in quality content than the quantity of content your website might have. One extremely well-researched and highly-engaged post will be more beneficial to your business, and your audience, than 10 very average posts.
Make Your Website As Fast As Possible
No one enjoys waiting for a web page to load, especially not a search engine.
Having a website that loads quickly will make your visitor feel satisfied and happy to continue browsing. As soon as it takes a page more than a few seconds to load, visitors get frustrated and won’t think twice about leaving.
Even if your content is top quality and has the right information people are looking for, they won’t stick around if they can’t access it nearly instantly.
Apart from visitors’ frustration, search engines also prioritize websites that load quickly. A few things that can be the cause of your slow site are large image files, text and graphics, or too many/unnecessary plugins.
It’s worth cleaning your site up every now and then to ensure it’s not getting too loaded with large, unimportant files, and more importantly, to ensure your visitors don’t leave!
Do Your Keyword Research
You’ve probably heard about the importance of keyword research in SEO. This is still a really important part of optimizing your website to rank organically in a search engine, so it shouldn’t be disregarded.
Before you publish any content, doing your keyword research will allow you to see how much competition relevant keywords have and whether they’re actually applicable to your message or not.
Essentially, keywords communicate to search engines what your page or post is about. They should be focused, not generalized, because otherwise, they can end up lost in a sea among thousands of others.
The more detailed and relevant you can make your keywords, the better chance search engines have of ranking you higher, and equally, the higher chance your audience has of finding you.
Understand The Difference Between On-Page And Off-Page SEO
This is an important differentiation to make. On-page SEO and off-page SEO are different but are both necessary.
On-page SEO is regarded as the parts of your website that you are in charge of. Things like what content you post, which keywords you use, how you optimize the speed of your site, your meta descriptions, etc., all make up this portion of SEO.
It’s a critical part of ranking your website organically on search engines.
The other type of SEO is off-page SEO. This is pretty much self-explanatory as it’s concerned with everything that takes place off your website. Basically, the things you cannot control.
Off-page SEO occurs when your website is linked on other websites, whether that’s to credit posts created by you, links to your site on social media, or anyone referring to your website on another website/platform.
This is, again, critical to organic website ranking and for increasing your authority among thousands of other websites.
The Way Forward
The power of eCommerce and the online marketplace is unrivalled. There should be no doubt in your mind that focusing on implementing stronger SEO strategies is the only way forward.
Keep these tips in mind because with the whole world interested in doing a lot more online shopping, you’re going to want to get yourself to the top of the search results page.
