As one of the main pillars of digital marketing, SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is overall seen as one of the most important ongoing efforts you can make to bring new users to your website. The biggest challenge? You will never be done with SEO, so the longer you wait, the more distance you have to travel.
Search engines, like Google and Bing/Yahoo, are always trying to provide the user with the most relevant information based on their search query. So, the golden SEO question arises, how do you become one of the top results on a search engine results page (SERP)?
Google does not come straight forward with their ranking algorithm, however there are a number of things that you can do to make sure your website and content are as tight and polished as possible. We will break these things down to 4 different areas; technical SEO, linking, user experience (UX) and keywords.
SEO: Technical SEO
Technical SEO is related to the technical aspects of your webpage that we know are related to search engine ranking. Some of these include, including relevant H1 tags, unique page titles and meta descriptions, intuitive URLs, redirects and technical errors. These types of errors can be crawled and reported back to help influence updates to your current site to be set up for search engine crawls.
SEO: Linking
Linking is a more difficult aspect of SEO. We know that Google looks at link equity, or link profiles to know what sites are reputable. Moz, one of the industry leaders in SEO and digital marketing, has created a algorithmic number that calculates domain and page authority based on linking. Domain Authority is calculated out of 100 to determine the reputation of a domain based on links. For example, if a site with a high domain authority links to your site, you will receive the benefit of a higher domain authority. The same happens if a spammy site with a low domain authority links to your site, you could potentially be docked points to your domain authority to reflect that. In order to keep a healthy link profile, it is recommended to review your backlinks and disavow any links that look like spam that could bring your domain authority down. More advanced linking strategy can be worked on to improve your domain authority through link strategy.
SEO: User Experience
User experience or UX, relates to just that; the experience the user has while on the site. This can relate to site speed, site security, and mobile friendliness. Much like search engines, your website should focus on giving your users the best experience possible. Have you ever felt pain points when trying to find something on a website and simply cannot find it!? This is poor user experience. Simple ways to enhance UX includes making sure your site is using a https instead of an http server, monitoring your site speed through image size and code optimizations, and most importantly, making sure your site is mobile friendly and responsive.
SEO: Keywords
Perhaps the most important aspect of SEO are keywords. When we look at search queries we look at them in a few ways; branded vs. non-branded, and short-tail and long-tail keywords. Branded keywords are the easiest to rank for. If a user knows your brand name and uses it as a query in a search engine, the user already knows of your brand and is looking particularly for you. The strategy comes into play for non-branded keywords. You will want to incorporate important and relevant keywords into your content and technical SEO where applicable and responsible as to not stuff keywords. With these non-branded keywords you also want to consider short-tail and long-tail keywords. Short-tail keywords are shorter and more broad queries that are related to your content while long-tail keywords include more words and are more specific. Keyword research should be performed to make sure you are considering related content and to see where your competitors are placing within popular search queries.
SEO does not need to be complicated and is one of the most beneficial ways to receive new users to your site by simply making sure your site is up to best practice especially where technical SEO, linking, UX and keywords are concerned.
If you have any questions related to SEO or want to know how Digital-ade can assist you and your site to get up to speed with search engine optimization, contact us today!