What is SEO
Search Engine Optimization is basically the process of organically expanding your website’s visibility on Search Engine Result Pages.
It gets traffic to your website from free, natural search actions in search engines thus helping in the overall improvement of the website’s position in search result pages. The higher the website is listed; the chances are of more people viewing it. SEO is important as it optimizes your website for search engines helping with the overall search ranking.
SEO is a vast field and requires specialization but if done correctly will definitely help you optimize your website. The guidelines for SEO have not changed in years but the word SEO has evolved into different aspects that all require due knowledge.
Considering off and on-page SEO is a good way to optimize the website. There are many approaches to pull off the same –
- Optimize the speed of your website.
- Responsive design of website for mobile and tablet devices.
- User-friendly experience.
- Design your content as simple as possible.
For example – your own fitness business, offering diet & workout tips on your fitness business website. Also on the website, you post an article about losing weight. With righteous SEO application, an individual searching “how to lose weight” may have a better chance of finding the article on your website and as a result, finding your brand. Several steps to improve your website for SEO.
Website should be useful for the targeted audience-
The search engines analyze millions of website content while you are just analyzing the specific audience. The engines use ranking signals to choose which content should be displayed on the first page of your search engine. So –
- Choose the best possible content for your website.
- The audience wants content that is useful for them so there should be no over-the-top content.
- Information should be specific keeping in mind the target audience.
- The content should offer significant value to the user.
When the focus is on SEO, you choose keywords related to search intent. Knowing how to use SEO in the right ways will definitely benefit your website.
Optimize the speed of your website-
Website speed or in other words page speed is an important optimization factor. Page speed is often confused with internet speed but in actuality, page speed is the time taken for the page to fully load its content, also known as page load time. Page speed is used by search engines to rank pages.
The higher the loading speed, the higher the ranking of a page in the search result. Speed is important for user experience. Pages with longer load times will have to face the issue of higher bounce rates and lower average time spent on the website’s page. Some ways to reduce the page load time –
- Enabling compression by reducing the size of your CSS, HTML, and JS files.
- By optimizing the CSS, HTML, and JavaScript codes. Unnecessary codes should be deleted.
- Reducing the redirects will also work in the favor of lowering the page load speed.
- The images you use should not be larger than required in size. Thus, image optimization should be done. CSS sprites can be useful for this purpose.
Responsive design of website for mobile and tablet devices-
What are the chances that you are reading this content on a mobile device? If you do not like the way in which this page is structured, you will probably look somewhere else for the information that you want. The solution to this is that the page or website should be designed in a responsive style. Let us discuss what are responsive designs.
Responsive web design is basically creating a web page that can adjust across various types of devices and screen sizes. Web designers create a user-friendly design by which the users can easily access and interact with the websites.
To get more traffic to a website, it is necessary for the website owner to make sure that the website should be accessible and easy to look through either on a small or big device.
A responsive web design should be a high priority because-
- It is no secret that nowadays the world has moved towards a mobile-first approach. With more users searching for even a bit of information on mobile devices, it has become extremely important the website should be platform friendly meaning that the website should adjust to any screen size. Even Google supports a ‘mobile-first’ approach.
- Responsive web design leads to improved usability making the website user-friendly, and easy to navigate through, thus making it easier for the user to find the information and making them stay on your website for a long span of time.
- The bounce rate also lowers if the design is responsive because the user will eventually like to stay on the website.
- The content should not be duplicate. Duplicity may lead to user disengagement. The content should offer a user-friendly experience.
Design your content as simple as possible
The biggest and the most challenging thing on which the whole website hangs on is the content. The vital step in optimizing the website for SEO is to generate engaging and appreciable content.
The content should be useable, relevant, and of high quality. The user should find it interesting and after consuming it, can share it with the relevant audience. Updating the content regularly is also an important step.
Keyword Research
Keyword research should be done while writing down the content for your website. Analyzing the keywords is vital because these keywords help you in finding the content ideas that people are looking for on search engines.
While researching for keywords you can come across low-competition content and use it as an opportunity. You can make use of these low-competition keywords, hence increasing the chances of getting more visitors and traffic to your website via search engines. Keywords are of different types like –
- Short tail keywords have a word length of one to two words, possessing the highest search volume but also having maximum competition.
- Middle tail keywords have a word length of three to four words with an average competition and moderate search volume.
- Long tail keywords have a word length of five or more words with the least competition and low search volume.
Optimizing your website for SEO is a necessity if you want overall business growth. The better rank of your website on a search engine will lead to more visitors per day. A higher ranking will increase the sales potential too.
To achieve a better rank on a search engine the work has to be done consistently. It is like going to a gym to get six-pack abs. Consistency is the key to getting your website in better shape. Investing in SEO will eventually pay off in the long run.