SEO refers to all the good practices necessary to optimize your website and help you gain relevance on search engines like Google. Having good SEO enables you to improve your website’s ranking and drive lots of quality traffic to it.
If your content does not meet your target audience’s expectations, you won’t get a lot. Before improving your website’s positioning, you should make sure you are sending the right message to your potential visitors.
Tip 1: Send the Right Message
Achieving your website’s maximum visibility requires you to have the right content. It is, therefore, crucial to know what motivates your users or potential customers and what needs you have. Once you achieve a clear understanding of that, you’ll get them handed over to you on a silver platter.
It’s also a good idea to evaluate your competence by doing all kinds of benchmark testing. In fact, that’s an absolute must for developing an effective content strategy.
Tip 2: Use Proper Keywords
To have a better idea of what your potential visitors are looking for, we recommend using free Google tools. For example, Google Trends can help you identify current search trends, while Keyword Planner will assist you in coming up with the right keyword strategy.
Tip 3: Ensure Originality
Once you know which keywords to use, you should make sure your content is based on them. Keep in mind that when it comes to improving the positioning of a website, quality is more important than quantity. Your content should be original and unique, so copy-pasting from other websites is an atrocious idea: google penalizes sites for spammy or duplicated content.
What you can do is provide your opinion about other people’s articles and cite a reference where the information comes from. By “content,” we do not necessarily mean just text. In fact, there are a lot of ways in which you can offer content. By attaching multimedia to your articles (e.g., images, photos, videos, audios, or pdf files), you will be gaining added value and attracting more traffic to your website.
Tip 4: Optimize Your Content
Once you know who you are targeting, what message you want to deliver, and what keywords you are going to use, you should start working on your website’s pages.
Your content should ensure 100% visibility. Add the right keywords to optimize a page or a post. We recommend using a very handy and simple addon called Yoast. If your website is WordPress-, Joomla-, or Drupal-based, you can easily install it and start working on all articles and sections instantly.
Tip 5: Generate Backlinks
Once you’ve optimized your website, you can start thinking of an effective promotion strategy. An alternative would be to generate backlinks on other websites, so you could promote your website by using Google’s PageRank (a list in which each site is categorized by relevance).
PageRank works by votes, which means that a link that points to your website is a vote that can boost your ranking. Not all votes have the same value. The link from a website with a higher PageRank position is worth more, so it can help you promote your website more effectively.
A simple way to generate backlinks is through social networks, other blogs, and forums.
Tip 6: Update Content Frequently
Updating your content as often as possible is essential, and there’s a very simple reason for that. You may have attracted a few visitors, but if they find no new content after a while, they will not return for more.
To prevent that from happening, you should provide them with a reason to come back. If you offer updated content on a regular basis, you will kill two birds with one stone: you’ll be enriching your website’s content and offering more value based on your needs (keep in mind that Google bots are always looking out for what we publish and index it).
Therefore, it’s beneficial to have a blog on your website and make sure the latest posts are previewed on the homepage. That way, your visitors can see something new without having to search for it.
If you go with a blog, we recommend posting stuff on it weekly before gradually increasing frequency. Keep in mind that the rate of publications also earns you points with Google.
For example, if you look at those services that offer college papers online, you’ll notice they have a blog where they post on a weekly or even daily basis.
Tip 7: Take Care of the Design
Your website’s design and usability are vital. In the case of an article, it is also essential to present the content in an attractive way. Using difficult-to-read fonts won’t help your visitors much, right? Nor will they find it helpful if the content disappears due to a layout bug. You should present your stuff with the user in mind. The easier and more attractive it is, the longer you be able to retain your visitors.
Tip 8: Let’s Find the Channels
Recently launched websites do not get visited a lot. Therefore, you should find the most appropriate channels to reach your target audience and turn it into quality traffic. Twitter and Facebook are not the only options you have. The fact that your neighbor has a Twitter account does not necessarily mean you should register one as well. You should pick your channels according to your audience.
Tip 9: Analyze Results
No online strategy will work if it’s not measurable. Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools will help you be aware of the performance and traffic of your website by providing you with some detailed statistics. It is very useful to know where your traffic comes from, what keywords show your pages, how long visitors stay on your website, and which page has the biggest CTR.
Tip 10: Rectify and Re-implement
Accurate statistics can help you control your website in real-time. For example, we can be mistakenly focusing on a keyword that ultimately does not give the desired results, or we can optimize resources to get the most out of our site’s performance. Websites should be kept alive because they’re our digital point of reference. It’s your office or your online store, and you should treat it with the same care and attention as if it were a real place.
When it comes to improving positioning, you should think of your website as a brand-new store. If nobody knows the address, they will never visit it, right? If the store does not have good visibility on the street, pedestrians will not spot it and, therefore, never enter it. The same rule applies to websites: if we don’t make an effort to make it known and seen, nobody will care.
