Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks

Search engine optimization is one of, if not the most, important things you can do to help generate traffic for your website. Search engine optimization is a set of rules, guidelines, and strategies that you can follow in order to help your website rank higher in Google searches. This is primarily accomplished with the strategic use of keywords throughout the website but can also be done by more technical means and by using other websites to promote your site.

On-Site and Technical Search Engine Optimization

One of the key factors that search engines, such as Google, use when determining where to rank websites on search results pages is on-site search engine optimization. On-site search engine optimization is done by choosing a few keywords for each page of your website to target and then placing just the right amount of those keywords in relevant places on the page. It is also done by creating content for the website that includes keywords like blog posts or articles. Content is not the only important area of on-site search engine optimization; technical search engine optimization is very important because, without it, your website risks not being ranked or having certain pages not ranked.

Begin your journey to search engine optimization by creating a keyword map for your website, choosing a few keywords to focus on for each page. Do this by choosing keywords having to do with that page and checking the search volume with a keyword search tool. Once you’ve determined the keywords you want to focus on, go through each of the website pages and insert the keywords where they fit naturally. By doing this, the pages will be more search engine optimized for those keywords. If desired, you could create a blog section on your website and use it to help your website ranking by posting useful, preferably long content because Google ranks websites with more words higher. If your blog posts are naturally small, they should still have at least 300 words because anything less and google may decide there’s not enough there and that post will be useless for search engine optimization purposes. For some more tips about blogging go here.

Most of your efforts to improve search engine optimization will also help with the customer experience on your website. Google’s search algorithm ranks websites that are more likely to help its users higher, so the better the website seems to be at giving users what they want, the higher Google will rank them.

Here are some tips to help you get started with on-site search engine optimization:

• Create high quality, useful content that includes the keywords naturally, a keyword density of between 2 and 5% is usually optimal. Your content should be thorough enough that it at least completely explains the basics of your topic. The main goal with content creation is that you answer questions that your customer may have.

• Since search engines cannot read or determine what media other than text is, always be sure that anything you post on your website has alt text. Alt text is the text that shows up when an image or video doesn’t load properly and is used to tell what the image is supposed to be. The search engine can use alt text to tell what an image or video is so that it will show up in image or video searches.

• Don’t put duplicate information on multiple pages of your website, Google will notice and will rank you lower because of this.

• Make sure that your website is optimized for both mobile and desktop. Although desktops still make a significant portion of Google searches, most Google searches are made on mobile devices. This has actually become of primary importance, because if a website is not optimized for mobile, Google removes it from its searches entirely, making search engine optimization pointless.

• Google prefers websites to have better security. If two websites are equal in Google’s eyes, the one with TLS encryption will be ranked above it.

• Your website should have a sitemap because Google can’t show in searches pages that it can’t find.

• Go through your entire website and check each link to make sure the link works properly because Google’s search algorithm will lower your rank for having broken links.

Although there are a lot of tips and some of them seem tedious, they are all very important that you do for your website in order to make it search engine optimized. By doing each of the tips, you can make it so that your website will appear higher on searches.

Off-Site Search Engine Optimization

Off-site search engine optimization is important because another key factor in your website’s ranking has to do with links on other websites that leads to yours. The quality of the website doing the linkng, the amount of links from that website, the variety of websites linking to your site, and how recently those links were made are all important factors in how high your website is ranked. Getting other websites to link to yours is tricky because it’s not as easily done as on-site search engine optimization and you have to either get lucky or build relationships with other webmasters in order to do so.

The first (and most important) step in off-site search engine optimization is to be sure that you have a great deal of high-quality content. By having high-quality content, other site’s webmasters may stumble onto your website, see your good, useful content, and decide to link people from its site to yours. Another tip to get links is to create useful videos. Videos are extremely easy to link to and put on people’s websites, thus the video becomes free advertising for your own site. You can also build relationships with other webmasters in your industry and both agree to link to each other’s websites mutually.

Here are some tips to help you with your off-site search engine optimization:

• Do Google searches on your own website’s name to see if any other websites have mentioned you without linking to your website. If you find any that don’t link back to you, contact the webmaster and request that they provide a link to your website along with the mention.

• Google your competition to determine which websites link to them as they may also want to link to your site. You can also check to see if there are certain types of content that tend to make other webmasters want to link to their site.

• Always make sure that you have a business profile set up on each of the main search engines (Google My Business, Yahoo Small Business, and Bing Places). You’ll want to do this because when people search for you, these profiles can give valuable information about your business, such as what you do, where you are located, and what your hours are.

• It can be useful to have a social media account set up for your business to attract more traffic and to update your customers on happenings within the business.

• Additionally, submit your website to any directories your industry has so that when people go looking for someone to hire or buy from, they will find you. This may not help your search engine optimization, but when people are looking to hire someone they will find your site.