Search engine optimization (SEO) and how it helps generate traffic to a website is something important that every marketing strategist should be able to understand. But, do you know how to effectively use your SEO skills and tools to help your pages land in the top spot on search engine results pages (SERPs)? It’s no easy task being able to ensure your website or product lands as high as possible. That’s why we’ve put together six SEO secrets to help you get higher and higher in the rankings.
1. Proper Keyword Research
Keywords are one of the main ways to get your blog to the first result in the SERPs, a key element to reaching your main demographic or target audience. If you know how to properly utilize SEO, then you should be able to tell what people are searching for and how to incorporate those keywords into your blogs and website, thus improving your ranking. Incorporating these keywords into your content will not only help people find your website but provide them with answers to their questions and educate them on your products or services. This will then help improve traffic to your posts and pages. Another easy way to incorporate keywords into your website is to include an FAQ page. By targeting frequently asked questions and including answers to them on your website, you become a relevant and reliable source of information. Google will then reward you with a higher ranking and may even include you at the top of the search results as a featured rich snippet.
2. Optimize Meta Tags
Meta tags are small bits of text that describe the content on a page. They are not visible on the page itself or to the reader but only appear in the page’s source code. Meta tags help tell the search engine algorithm what your page is about and which information within the page to display on the SERPs. There are four main types of meta tags:
Meta Keywords
This type of tag is not used anymore because it is no longer considered beneficial. Previously, people would add unrelated tags to their pages so they would show up when anyone was searching for those keywords, which resulted in unrelated content appearing higher on the SERPs and giving unrelated websites more visits and clicks. Google no longer uses meta keywords in their algorithm for this reason.
Title Tags
These are the most important type of meta tags. They are the visible lines of text that a user sees after your website’s HTML when a search is prompted in Google. It’s essentially a keyword-rich, simplified version of your title that is used for SEO purposes. This helps the search engine place and rank your post or website in the SERP. It also allows you to keep a more formal title for your readers in the actual post or page itself.
Meta Descriptions
When you search for something on Google, the description under the article title or website header is the meta description attribute. These are the blocks of text underneath your meta title that explain to search engines what your page is about. They will appear to the user as well and won’t affect your SEO ranking but are helpful for users trying to decide which links to click on. Most of the time it can just be a random pull quote from the post or page, but it’s important to know how to utilize this meta tag and incorporate keywords to improve overall SEO ranking.
Meta Robots
This is code that tells the search engines if your page can be trusted or not. You don’t need to be a coder to implement this step, but an experienced digital marketer will know how to utilize these tools to help with their successful SEO campaign.
3. Optimize Content
Optimizing content is essential to making sure your pages generate returning traffic, improve rankings, and are relevant in the industry. To be successful and reach the maximum amount of readers, you have to make sure your content is accessible to everyone. Similarly, you have to make sure that your website and posts are visually appealing to the reader. If your website looks like it hasn’t been updated in years, people are not likely to trust the information or return to your website. All of the content on your webpages and blogs can be pulled by search engines to help your rankings. This means you should be using keywords as often as possible to help increase your rankings and (ideally) traffic to your website as well. However, be sure to incorporate keywords organically and try to avoid stuffing them just for the sake of including them – they should be relevant to your topic. The key to this is writing content and optimizing it so it makes sense within your chosen topic. It should read naturally, answer the reader’s questions, and educate them enough to make them want to click through and read more.
4. Schema Markup
Schema markup is code you put on your page to help search engines provide more relevant results to searchers. It tells the search engine not only what your page says, but what it means if used correctly. For example, if you search “natural SEO” you will see that Google has highlighted the text on our website and pulled the section of the content to display as a rich snippet. Because of schema markup and the code that’s been applied to the page, the search engine understands what the content means, and it’s being indexed and returned to the user that’s searching for the term with the most relevant information. This does not necessarily improve SEO ranking but helps generate traffic and clicks on your website.
5. Link Building
Search engines use the content on a webpage, as well as links, to decide how to rank a page on Google. Think of it like a referral or recommendation: The more links on the internet that point to your post or website, the higher your SERP ranking will be. Looking for linking opportunities on other high domain websites is not only a vote of confidence to search engines, but it also shows that this page is worth linking to and the information must be valid. It is also helpful when building symbiotic relationships with other companies and influencers. If they are linking to your website and you are linking to theirs, you are helping each other, and in turn, building a larger user base and trust for your company.
6. Website Speed
Website speed is extremely important in today’s digital marketing world. Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and it is very important to capture someone’s attention within the first few seconds of them landing on your page. A slow site will cause people to look elsewhere for their information almost immediately. To improve your website’s speed, you must make sure that you have a good website hosting plan. By ensuring that your website is backed by a safe and reliable hosting source, you will be able to provide a more stable site for your customers. In addition, you should be sure to optimize your images for faster website speed. Loading large image files can slow down your website. To fix this problem, use a graphic editing tool to reduce the image file size or one of the many plug-ins that are offered to you through your hosting platform.
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