SEO is often framed as an overly complicated and time consuming marketing strategy. While SEO can take aconsiderable amount of time, and the technical side can be complicated at times, SEO is still vital to the success of any online business.
Luckily, many businesses can benefit from a simple list of SEO best practices to maximize their onlineexposure and boost revenues. Let’s get started!
Get Your Title Right
There may be no more important signal to search engines than the Title tag of a webpage. At the bare minimum, the keyword best corresponding to that page’s content should be included in the Title, preferably towards the front as this is where it has more weight.
Ideally, the page Title should be compelling and entice users to click on your listing as this is also what users see in the search engine results.
Site Speed Is Essential
Internet users are growing increasingly impatient. Nobody wants to wait for five or more seconds for a page to load. Users want websites to load quickly so they can find what they need and move along.
An experienced SEO COMPANY will at least test the load speed of all the pages on a site to determine whether technical improvements need to be made. There is no such thing as a page that loads too quickly.Compressed images, clean website code and reliable web hosting are all key to fast load speeds. For advanced users, you can even look into content delivery networks (CDN) to host and load the largest files on your site.
Links Fuel Rankings, But Only The Right Links
Links are essential to a website’s traffic in two ways. The first is that users still find new content by clicking on links from one site to another. Generally speaking, the more links a page receives, the more likely that page can get traffic from people clicking on those links.
The second point is that links are a strong indicator of authority. A large number of links indicates that a page is seen as popular and valuable by other web masters. These links have to be the correct type of link to offer any ranking benefit, but links are a strong indicator of authority, which often leads to higher search rankings.
It should be noted that in the past, getting any kind of link was all that mattered, so long as they had high PageRank. Today, Google algorithm updates, such as PANDA and PENGUIN, are forcing link building tactics to be based on quality and relevance. The best practice is to get links from relevant pages, regardless of PageRank. A page about dog food linking to another page about dog food is more valuable than a page aboutdog food linking to a page about airplanes.
Integrate Social Sharing With SEO Campaigns
A RECENT STUDY noted that half of websites struggling with SEO had failed to integrate social media into their SEO campaigns.
Social sharing can result in more traffic, and helps to spread a website’s content to those who may share it further, or create a link on their own websites.
Target The Right Keywords
Keyword research is much larger than just finding terms with large search volumes and a low number of competing pages. To target the best keywords, it is important to find the phrases that your target customer uses when discussing products, services and general information. Great keywords can be found on social media, through GOOGLE’S KEYWORD TOOL, on forums and even other blogs.
Conclusion
These five best practices should be the bare minimum of what a reputable SEO COMPANY focuses on. Focusing on proper website promotion and providing a positive user experience goes a long way to SEO success.
