Your website looks great. You’ve hired an expensive developer and a talented developer to make your page look incredible. But you don’t have any traffic. Why not? “If you build it, they will come,” right? Wrong. You need to put more effort and time into marketing your website and making it findable by Google. Wondering why when you search for your product it doesn’t come up on your search engine? Don’t worry– we’ll help you out.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s the number one thing that you need to make sure your website is able to be indexed and found by search engines. Oh, sure– that makes sense. But how does it work? Well, luckily we’ve made a nice infographic over here to help you out.
Basically, Google (or whatever search engine you’re working with) will “crawl” your website looking for meta tags, keywords, inbound and outbound links, and more to establish its legitimacy and trustworthiness and relevance. If the Googlebot deems your website relevant to whatever search query is being asked of it by a consumer on the other end of the line, it’ll show up on their search engine results page (SERP). Of course, it’s a little more complex than that– there’s hundreds of factors that go into what determines your ranking on the SERP. Things like Google reviews, Facebook reviews, alt image attributes, and so on all affect your ranking. Essentially, search engines are looking for legitimacy. SEO helps you establish that.
SEO is not paid advertising. It’s an organic search result listing from the search engine. Think of it this way: Paying for ads works like a painkiller– it’s an immediate result that you see quickly, with a number of impressions, clicks, and so forth. SEO works a little more like an antibiotic– it’s a process, has to be done carefully, and results aren’t seen right away– but when they are, they’re long-term.
If you’re using WordPress for your website, Yoast SEO is an extremely powerful plugin to help you manage SEO on individual pages and check to see if they’re optimized. Great for beginners and serious SEO aficionados alike.
Best practices?
There’s a lot of factors that go into SEO and your ranking level on a SERP, but the main ones are as follows:
- Unique and valuable
- Search engine bots and crawlers look for a unique site that doesn’t have the same content and keywords copy and pasted throughout. You
- User experience
- You can’t target your website to just a search engine crawler bot; you have to think about your customers as well. How is their experience going to be on you site? Have you been overloading with keywords and making unreadable content? Maybe a search bot won’t notice (right away), but a person definitely will. And if your website isn’t fun or easy to use, people won’t want to come back– which will lead to less clicks, search crawlers noticing, and not ranking your page anymore. Do it for the people!
- Targeted, specific keywords
- Each page on your website should have a uniquely targeted keyword to dominate it. Try not to use the same keyword more than once– unless you absolutely have to. Get creative! What are you selling? Don’t be afraid to go niche.
- Mobile-optimized
- Well, it’s almost 2017. What do you expect? Of course search bots want your site to be mobile-friendly. Nearly 60 per cent of searches are now done on a mobile device. Make sure your website is optimized.
- Metadata
- To simplify this, metadata is data that describes other data– such as the author, date published, even your business address and phone number. Make sure you take care to keep everything correct and up to date.
Worst practices?
Well, now you know what to do properly. But what about what not to do? As a FREE BONUS GIFT for you, we’ve made another infographic– this one to tell you all about what you shouldn’t do when implementing SEO on your website. Enjoy!
