What would you do if your website was not being found on Google, Bing, Yahoo or any other search engine? Would you stop using the internet to promote your products and services? Why not take a few minutes to learn about what optimization is and how it can help get your website ranking higher in search engines so that more people will be able to find it? You might be surprised at how simple of an update you could make to increase your site’s visibility.
Understanding SEO basics
Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is the process of improving your website to help it rank higher in search engines. Many websites that have been well optimized are able to generate more traffic and sales than those who don’t know what they’re doing. You may be wondering how you can do this for yourself without knowing much about coding or the internet.
Understand how search engines work
Before you can start optimizing your website, you first need to understand how search engines themselves work. You’ll want to know that they use algorithms in order to determine the ranking of a page based off of certain variables. The main purpose is the quality and relevancy of information on a particular page. To achieve that, there are a few things that you’ll need to know. There are three primary categories of ranking signals:
Identifying Keywords For Better Ranking
Search engines have been revolutionized by the use of keywords. When people are searching, they usually enter in certain terms to find what they’re looking for. It’s important to take note of what words and phrases your customers may be using so that you can optimize your site accordingly.
On-Page Optimization
Once you’ve identified your keywords, you’ll need to start optimizing your page to get it ranked higher in search results. There are a few simple on-site factors that you want to keep in mind when starting out with SEO.
Platform
What platform is your website built with? This might not seem like an important question at first, but it actually plays a big role in how well your website performs if optimized correctly.
Off-Page Optimization
There are a handful of things that you can also do to get your website more on the search engines without actually editing the page itself. This is what’s known as off-site optimization and includes:
Beware Of Black Hat SEO Tactics
Many people who aren’t familiar with how SEO works think that spamming keywords onto their pages will help them rank better in search results. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t work and may even hurt you in the long run. We’ll talk more about avoiding these practices later on when we give you some tips for getting started. There are plenty of other simple ways that you can optimize your site that don’t involve trying to cheat the system like this. It’s best not to get into it if you can help it.
Make Sure That Your Site Is Mobile Friendly
Another thing to keep in mind when optimizing your website is its compatibility with mobile devices. The fact of the matter is that many people these days are going online through their smartphones and tablets rather than computers, so you’ll want to make sure that your page looks great on those types of devices as well. If you don’t have a responsive design, then I’d highly recommend taking some time to look into it before moving forward.
Don’t Put All Of Your Eggs In One Basket
The biggest mistake that businesses make when trying to achieve higher search engine rankings is using a single source for marketing their products or services. You’ll want to make sure that you’re using multiple platforms rather than just one if possible. If not, then try to focus on the biggest ones such as LinkedIn or Facebook.
Tools For Better SEO Practices
Now that you know all about how search engines work and what you can do to optimize your site for them, it’s time to get started with some of those tips. Here are a few tools that will help with your SEO practices:
Adding Meta Tags For Enhanced Visibility
Adding meta tags to your website can help boost its visibility in search engines. This is a simple way that you can get started right away and requires no coding knowledge whatsoever.
Taking Advantage Of Social Media Sites
Social media is becoming more heavily relied on for visibility in search results, so it’s important to take advantage of opportunities like this where you can. Anytime that someone mentions your company name on a social network, it will be recorded by the search engine and may eventually influence how high up your page ranks. It’s best to concentrate most of your resources on the biggest ones such as Facebook and Twitter.
Creating Content That Works Well with Algorithms
It’s important to make sure that your content is unique. Duplicate content won’t be given very high priority by the search engines so it’s best to avoid that if you can. Adding videos, pictures and other types of media to your page will help with its ranking as well.
Doing Frequent Site Maintenance
You’ll also want to keep a close eye on the work being done on your website from an SEO perspective. For example, you might need to change something about the coding or design if certain words or pages aren’t showing up in search results anymore after tweaking around with things a bit. It’s best just to take some time every week or month and check on these sorts of issues so that they don’t come back later.