Search Engine Optimization, or commonly known as SEO is essential in any industry if you are using the Internet. Search Engine Optimization will help your website and your business get a proper position where consumers or traffic will easily spot them when they are looking for products or services that your company is offering.
What are search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing, are looking for? How can you build your site in a way that it can attract the attention of search engines and consumers or traffic? How can Search Engine Optimization help your website get more attention and eventually, became profitable? These are the questions that need to be answered before you can say that the SEO you are doing to your website is successful.
When SEO was introduced by SES New York, Director of SEO, 435 Digital and Chicago Tribune, Carolyn Shelby, she explained how vital SEO is to websites and you the business in general. The Introduction to SEO session was made for newcomers in the industry. Shelby’s SEO tips can offer reminders for both newcomers and SEO experts who are working Search Engine Optimization for many years.
What is SEO or Search Engine Optimization?
According to Align Digital Marketing Yelp page, the goal of SEO is not to cheat the search engine. It is to create a seamless and great experience for the target market or the consumers. Website owners should communicate clearly to the search engines what your website is all about so that they can recommend your site to people who are looking for products or services that you are offering.
Your website is like a delicious cake
The links, social media accounts and paid search are like the icing on the cake. The contents you are posting, the information architecture, the infrastructure and the content management system serves as the sugar that makes the cake. Without it, the cake will be boring and tasteless.
What Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines are looking for in a website?
The search engine is doing their job as useful as possible by leading the traffic or users to contents and websites that they are looking for. The big question is, “How can a search engine determine the relevance of a website?”
Some factors that determine the content’s relevance include:
Content – It is determined by the theme given to the website, the context of the page, the description and the title of the site.
Performance – Does your website work properly? How fast is your site compared to your competitors?
Authority – Are your contents good enough to attract consumers and search engines alike? Do other websites that are more popular uses your site as a reference?
User Experience – Is your website good enough to satisfy every user that visits it? Is it safe? How was the bounce rate compared to other sites?
Search engines are not looking for
Every search engine only has a certain amount of data storage at their disposal. So, if the goal of your website is to perform black hat techniques to gain an advantage, think again. It will only hurt your site and your business in the long run instead of gaining something from it.
Search engines don’t like websites do:
Keyword stuffing – Overusing the keywords on the website’s contents.
Bought links – Buying links to boost your website will not give you an advantage when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. Search engines are programmed to detect what is paid and what is organic. So, you are just wasting your time and money.
Poor quality user experience – If your website is poorly made and it takes hours for the users to understand and know how to navigate your website, then you better fix your website before search engines give you poor ratings. You also need to avoid too many advertisements to your site and let the users find what they are looking for quickly.
Creating quality media content like video content is one way to boost the ranking of your website. Search engines rank your site faster if you are posting relevant videos compared to plain text content. You need to focus more on your non-text materials because they give more importance compared to images and plain text. If you are using PDFs or Flash, you need to make sure that you are updated to their latest practices so that search engines can crawl your contents faster.
(To know the best search engines by rank, visit http://www.thesearchenginelist.com.)
You need to always keep Search Engine Optimization your priority because, in this digital age, the search engine gives more importance to SEO compared to other marketing practices. You have to be updated to what’s new and what’s trendy. Make sure you understand the basics of SEO because it will be the foundation of your website marketing.