SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION SEO
SEO Tactics to imrove your search engine ranking!
In today’s crowded world of websites on the internet, a good SEO strategy is a must,
to give your website a chance to be high enough of the search engine rankings to
show up on the first page of top ten websites that show up on the internet search
engines like google, bing, yahoo, duckduckgo, and more. Higher search engine
rankings, the more traffic that will be sent to your website.
Search Engine Trends
Search engine companies are always tweaking their search algorithms and changing
the value they attach to certain aspects of each and every website. They do this to
continuously improve the end user experience, serving the most relevant types of
results, so their vwebsite visitors will keep coming back to their search engine to
perform their internet searches. You could show up in the Top 5 on a search engine
today, the Top result next month, then back down to number sixty after a major
algorithm change on the search engine site.
If people keep going back to your webpage, and you have an active social media
presence linked to your website with a lot of activity, and search engine users
frequently click on your website when it is displayed in search engine results, your
will become more relevant and continue to improve your search engine ranking,
which brings more traffic, which improves your search engine ranking, which brings
even more traffice, which will continue to improve your search engine ranking, and
the cycle continues and will grow and grow some more. It’s a challenge and a game,
until you reach success.
Reaching a level of success, bringing you more website traffic than you even could
have dreamed of does not mean your done. Search engine optimization needs
some TLC. You need to massage it, and continue to improve, adding content, to
keep the success going strong. It’s both fun and exciting as you start to see the
improvements you make really start to make a difference.
This list of 12 Search Engine Optimization SEO factors are a must:
1. Crawlable Website
Your website needs to be crawlable, with an easy path for the search engine
crawlers to crawl through your site. Monitor Google webmaster tools for any crawl
errors. Create a sitemap and submit it to Google on your Google Webmaster tools.
2. Website Architecture
The design of your website should be simple, easy for your visitors, and the search
engine crawlers, to walk through. This will not only help with your SEO, but it will
bring your website visitors back for more. You should make use of Heading tags.
Only one H1 tag on a page, and multiple H2 tags, and both of which should include
keywords, which would also be include in the title and description of your page, etc.
3. Outbound Links
Outbound links to good and relevant authority sites are good for your SEO. The
opposite is also true, outbound links to bad or irrelevant sites are bad for your SEO.
Dofollow links are the type of link you want for SEO, the Nofollow links do not do
much to help with your SEO, but they do still have some good SEO effects. It is a
good practice to add two or three out outbound links to good and relevant authority
sites on each page you optimize to improve your SEO.
4. Website Speed
The speed of your site is a critical factor for SEO to get good search engine rankings.
Too large of images, videos, scripts that run, and scripts that call on external sites to
display something on your website can all affect the speed of your website. Your
hosting provider service can also affect your website if your have a shared hosting
plan, or a hosting plan that was not intended for the amount of website traffic that
you are getting. Keep an eye on all of this.
5. Mobile Usability
About half of the internet traffic today is on mobile devices such as tablets and
phones. Your site should be optimized to be mobile friendly. Use a responsive
theme on your website template. Don’t place your links too close together, space
them with more than a line in between them so that your website visitors can click
on them separately.
6. Use HTTPS
Even if you do not do anything with your website that needs to be protected to
protect your website visitors, having an https secure site is a must. Certain web
hosting plans come with free, or reasonably priced, certificates. On my hosting plan
with BlueHost, it is a free feature that just comes with my hosting plan.
7. User Friendly Web Page URL’s
Your web url for your main site should not be too long, and it should be user
friendly and simple. Each of your pages on your website should also be named with
user friendly names, as they become part of the URL for each page.
8. Well Targeted Keywords
Keywords are critical. It can be quite difficult to place high in the search engine
rankings for single word keywords. But it can be done, especially if you optimize
your pages for SEO. It’s best to target long tail keywords. For example, it’s going to
be easier to place for “family camping tents” than it would be for the word tent.
9. Keyword Optimization
This is the process of researching, analyzing, and choosing the best keywords to
target for your website. Every single page of your website (that you want to rank
high) should be optimized in it’s keyword use. If you plan for each page of your
website, what it will be about, you can optimize the keywords. Take the subject of
the page, and think of all the keywords that someone might search for that you
hope would bring traffic to your site.
Use those keywords in the text on the page, in the filename of the page, in the page
title, in the page description. If you think of a keyword, think of what else could go
with it, what words are similar but in the same subject, and use those too. The
search engines don’t want you to use the same words, repeated, but will look at the
page as a whole and rank you higher for having related keywords and content that
they would expect to see on a quality page about the subject. Use your keywords in
your H1 tag, in your H2 tags, in your image details.
10. Image Optimization
For good search engine rankings, you should take advantage of having images,
adding your keywords in the Alt Text and filename of the image, so the search
engine crawlers will be able to identify what the images are, and increase your
ranking due to the relevance they have about the subject of each page.
11. Click Through Rate
One of the most important factors in search engine ranking is how much your page
is liked by it’s audience. How many times your page shows up in the search results,
and when it is displayed for a search engine user, how often it is clicked on. As well
as if they go to your page, and actually stick around or if they quickly come back to
the search engine to select a more relevant page to go to. Click through rate is one
of the most important as the more it is clicked on in the search results, the more
relevant it becomes due to the choice that website visitors make to choose your
page. The more it is clicked, the higher up in the search results your page will go.
The goal is to end up in the Top 5, but you may start in the hundreds, and slowly
climb your way up as you improved and optimize your website for SEO.
12. Social Media Presence
You should setup social media profiles on all the more popular social media sites
and link them all to your website. You can create posts to share links to your
different pages. The more followers you get on your social media accounts, and
activities such as likes, comments, and shares, the more relevant your site will
become, which improves your search engine rankings.
Now for the fun stuff and a little more detail.
1. Analyze Your Competitors
One of the most effective SEO tactics that you can do to help your search enging
rankings is to analyze your competitors and what they are doing. Perform some
internet searches for your product or service, industry, geography, keywords, type of
website, or other relevant factors. The top ten will be your competitors that you can
start with to start your analysis and planning. What you are looking for is areas what
your competitor is doing that is working so well to land them high up in the search
rankings, and you can also find areas that you can see they are not doing right or
good enough, and you can improve upon them.
Competitor Analysis Components
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Keyword Analysis
•
Link Building Analysis
•
Content Analysis
Competitor Keyword Analysis
One of the most important areas to drill down in on for improving your SEO, to
improve your website ranking, is to spend some time to research what your
competitors are doing for their keywords, and using keyword suggestion tools such
as KeySearch, Moz Keyword Explorer, searchvolume.io. or Google Keyword Planner
can help you find keywords that your competitors are using, and to identify
keywords that have a high search volume that will help drive traffic to your website.
Competitor Link Building Analysis
Next on the list of SEO elements to work on is link building. Link building is
important for improving your website's SERP rankings. Look for their origin,
numbers, and the anchor text they use to help determine how your competition is
performing on this front. It may be worth contacting those sites to see if they can
provide backlinks to your site as well. An example on how to look for back links to a
website on google is to type in link: and the webite of your competitor in the search
field on google to see all the backlinks that Google has identified on the internet
that link to that website. Example - link:mendenhalloutdoors.com
Competitor Content Analysis
Next on the list of SEO elements to work on is content analysis. You can start by
taking a look at the content on your competitors websites. Things to take a look for
is how active they are on their website, how often they typically post new content,
how long is their content (about how many words), how they structure their pages
and content. By learning from what your competition is doing on their website, you
will have a good starting point on what types of things that you can do to get your
website higher up in the search engine rankings to bring more visitors to your
website. You are not looking to copy their content, this is not just wrong, it will end
up earning you penalties from the search engines that will actually lower your
website rankings. Instead, you are looking to copy the good practices that they are
using, not the words of the content itself. You want to learn from them, not take
from them. Key tools that you can use to perform your competitor analysis are
SpyFu, SEMrush, and Ahrefs to speed up and automate a lot of the tedious work you
would normally have to do manually. These tools still take work, but they do simplify
it quite a bit.
2. Analyze Your Website’s Backlinks
While backlinks are a crucial component for your SEO strategy to improve your
search engine ranking, not all backlinks are good. Backlinks are rated based on the
quality of site that the website it is coming from. If you get backlinksSome will
naturally tend to perform better than others, so it's important to monitor their
performance. This helps you zero in on the types of backlinks which are most
valuable. Or understand which sites tend to drive the highest quality traffic. You
may want to remove certain links or unilaterally disavow them if they are adding no
value or penalizing your search rankings. Tools like Majestic, Ahrefs, or Moz Open
Site Explorer can help you conduct a thorough backlink analysis of your website.
3. Optimize Your Website For Mobile
About half of all internet activity today is done on mobile devices, so optimizing your
website for Mobile visitors is important, and is an SEO ranking component to pay
attention to. Many website templates and web developer built websites are built
with a responsive design that will size the page for the type of device it is being used
on. This will not only improve the user experience of your website visitors, it will
help you with your search engine ranking as well.
4. Use Secure HTTP
All websites developed today should use https as it’s simple to setup for your
website, and any good web hosting provider either provides the needed certificate
for making your website an https site, or will provide one at a decent price. Having a
secure site that uses https provides security and privacy for your website visitors by
securing the communication used between your website servers to the visitors
computer to give them the peace of mind that there is less of a chance that
someone can intercept and view what they are doing and entering on your website.
The added benefit for you is that is good for SEO and your search rankings as it
increases the trustworthiness of your website.
5. Optimize Your Page Speed
Page speed is an important factor for your seach engine rankings. Nobody wants to
view a slow page whether it’s caused by large images or other files that take a long
time to load, or the speed of your server or hosting provider network. It’s good to go
with a good name hosting provider, but it’s also good to optimize your web pages
for speed by making any pictures or files needed to download to view on the user’s
screen not too large in size. You can also use high compression on your images to
improve your page load speed as well.
6. Optimize for Voice Search
Another thing that you can do to give you that extra edge to climb up in search
results is to optimize your website for voice search functionality. When you focus on
voice search functionality, your goal is for the Google Assistant, Siri, or Alexa to find
you as a featured snippet which means they will read out the information from
these sources and may even site your page as the source as well.
7. Use Structured Data
The search engine site’s website crawlers continue to get more and more advanced
on a regular basis. You should not only organize your site so it is a good experience
for your website visitors, but another important aspect is for the website crawlers to
be able to understand your data so that you will rank higher in search results. One
way to do that is to use structured data to organize your page for a search engine
friendly website crawl. To use structured data, simply put, is to build your website
with formatting that will give you a uniform and organized layout that not only your
website visitors will like, but the website crawlers will be able to crawly the page
better, and the algorithms will be able to understand your website better with less
errors to help improve your website search engine rankings.
8. Optimize for Website Crawlers
Besides using structured data, you also have to remember that the website crawlers
can’t see images. So if you have photo’s or videos on your website, you should
always give them file names that take advantage of having another place to use
important keywords, as well as the alt image text fields populated with another
place to use important keywords. Use your H1 and H2 tags.
Only use one H1 tag, and however many H2 tags that you need. This gives you that
structured data that you need, and also makes your website look nice throughout
the site using the same look with each page. Each page in your website should be
named a relevant name that uses important keywords for each page in particulre.
Populate the keywords field for each page, it’s important to tell the search engine
crawlers the keywords that you think are important to your site, then of coarse
those keywords should be in the content.
Good page titles, not just the names, good search engine results that will entice a
website visitor to click on your page in the search result is important as well. You
could show up in search results to millions of people, but if they don’t click on your
page it does not do you any good. When you do your competitor analysis, you will
see what other sites are doing that is putting them into the top search engine
rankings.
9. Do Not Copy Other Sites
The goal is to learn from your competitors, not copy their content. You will get
penalilzed by the search engines if they see duplicate content from other websites.
If you are an affiliate of a company to show their products on your site to earn a
commission if they buy anything, sometimes these vendors will provide content for
you to post on your website. They are not meaning for you to copy it and paste it.
You have to customize it and make it unique to your site. This is not only good for
your website visitors, but it ensure you do not get penalized for taking someone
else’s content, even if you have their permission to do so. Always customize it, make
it better, and catered towards your website and your website visitors. Nobody
knows your people better than you.
To Sum Up SEO Search Engine Optimization
There is no reason to start from scratch trying to reinvent the wheel. Learn what the
competition is doing right, find what they also may be doing wrong, think of new
ways that you could do it to make it better to optimize your website for SEO search
engine optimization techniques that will put you in the top five websites on a search
engine ranking to bring more traffic and website visitors to your site.
Improving your search engine rankings will bring you more traffic. To get high
search engine rankings you have to look at your website from a website visitor
perspective, and then from a computer code perspective, meaning what will the
search engines see. They won’t see your images, so you should provide file names
using keywords.
Website Content Creation Services
BUY OR SELL A BUSINESS
If you’re looking to buy or sell your business you will want to use a professional who
understands the market and may be able to save you both time and money. If you
would like to discuss any of this further or the types of services that are offered,
contact Michelle Mendenhall as she is a member of the IBBA (International Business
Brokers Association), a Certified Business Broker, and a Commercial Real Estate
Specialist.
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