The Winning SEO Formula?
Understanding the most essential guidelines to boost your site’s visibility and traffic
Imagine this scenario: Your business is at the cusp of a world-wide website launch. You’ve spent several months making sure it is fully functional, implemented a top-notch user interface based on modern design standards and spent long hours performing beta testing. You claim that the app will solve customer pain points and you use the best marketing tools in your arsenal to build anticipation for launch day. Once the website is officially launched, you notice that the site is not being used by your audience or is not appearing on the first screen of any search engine. As a business owner, you are completely disappointed and want to know what went wrong in the whole process.
Most likely, the problem here is that either the team did not 1) submit their website for indexing on Google or 2) failed to correctly apply Search Engine Optimization (SEO, for short) onto the respective web pages. Today, SEO is a known game changer for every business trying to mark their presence on the web. Whether it is a small business or a large one, all competitors in the digital space are aware of this term but most of them are unable to implement it on their site, in a manner to boost user traffic.
Basic statistics show that Google accounted for processing an average of 2+ trillion searches as of 2016. That’s a huge number. True that there are other alternatives on the internet, namely: Baidu, Bing and Yandex but among all of them, Google clearly emerges as the market leader with a share of 74% in the search engine industry. Consequently, businesses are working diligently towards achieving maximum rank on Google but, we also know that the difficulty of reaching that point is only increasing as hundreds and thousands of web apps are indexed by the search engine every day.
Here, we aim to share the winning SEO formula and applying it in the best possible manner that enables companies and business alike to get the most out of their site. We will go through some of the essential concepts to keep in mind to expand your site’s search engine visibility and to effectively start growing your user base:
Post Original Content, Regularly
We’ll start off with the content aspect of SEO. It cannot be emphasized enough how important original content plays a role if you want to maintain your business for long-term purposes. Your online presence and Google ranking depends heavily upon the way you dole out blogs, posts or media on your web app. That is why SEO experts follow Bill Gates’ phrase almost religiously that:
“Content is king”
Original and fresh content is harder to come up with. More time-consuming in essence, bloggers very commonly resort to creating duplicate content by copying content from multiple websites and then stitching them together accordingly to make it look as authentic as possible. Usually, content that is more insightful, research oriented but at the same time conveyed in easy language gets more views and appreciation from readers than content that seems plagiarized. What will set your business apart from other competing websites is the quality and originality of the posts you share.
Use Meaningful Media
Apart from textual content, using images, videos and infographics goes hand-in-hand in making your content engaging. When words fall short to describe a certain topic or piece of information, visual content comes in handy in most cases. When considering at SEO standpoint, the more time users spend on a particular post with media that adds value to them, gives Google an indication that people are browsing through a genuine website. This in turn increases your site’s rank, which is always good.
When adding digital media to your posts, it is highly considered best practice to add the following meta data to improve your overall SEO rating:
- Meta title tag
- Alternate tag (Google indexes the picture with an alt-tag if the main title is already taken)
- Meta description
What happens is that users share interesting pieces of media with their friends or colleagues on the social web, and given that proper naming conventions have been applied onto images and videos, goes towards improving the accessibility of information sharing. Apart from that Google bots are able to make better sense of visual data through these tags when crawling through the site.
Target Your Keywords Appropriately
Keywords form the main basis of search visibility on Google. Users search for terms and blogs that are relevant to them. Using commonly occurring words increases your probability of appearing on the individual’s search page. However, it is highly discouraged not to use common keywords too frequently as it affects click-through rate and ranking, that is why marketing personnel spend time mapping out strategies to use the right keyword to address their target audience.
The rule of thumb to go by when planning out your keywords is not to overload your posts and pages with too many of them. That is keyword stuffing and is a form of spam that Google notices through their algorithms. Using the same keywords across different posts to attract more crowd is bad practice and surely a business owner knows that they cannot game the system.
Instead, the reasonable strategy to go forward with is by using phrases and terms that are unique; but, at the same time, relevant to the post. The keywords being used needs to look natural and should fit the context, such that the audience can easily associate with. Unique keywords not only means setting yourself apart from your competitors but also have room to use that particular term often since its being relatively under-utilized.
Make Your Search Feature Accessible
Your users are looking for answers to questions or maybe solutions to their problems. If your search feature is not functional or does not show relevant answers then what is the point of all the existing content on your page.
Businesses undervalue the search feature on their app and consider it secondary. Little do they know that it serves an opportunity to understand customers better, a means to gather data in order to prioritize information better in the future. It is also imperative that this feature adds value to your target audience. At times when a particular piece of content is not available on the front page; but may be present elsewhere, users would ideally search for it through typing in certain keywords.
Information such as phone number, location details, food menu or any important information that may possibly lead to user conversion should be searchable.
Go Mobile or Go Home
Through careful auditing of page visitors on commonly visited websites, more users land on websites through mobile devices than from desktop computers and the numbers increase every year. There is ample evidence on the web, stating how mobile adoption is at an all time high, all around the world. In today’s world, businesses are supposed to have a mobile-first mindset and it makes absolute sense to carry out optimizations for mobile devices (Phones, tablets, digital notebooks) to drive and multiply user traffic that they would otherwise devoid off with just a desktop app.
Apart from the usual desktop format, Google bots also crawl through the mobile version of your site to check for certain aspects such as responsiveness, content font-size, page-load speed and compression of media. In order to increase your user conversion rate, businesses need to cater to the above mentioned factors and implement a mobile-friendly app, following the most recent design and content standards that comply with Google’s policies.
Additionally, since Google is regularly releasing updates on their rules and regulations, it is important to keep note of what changes are needed to be made with regard to your current SEO settings.
Conclusion
Eventually, SEO boils down to how effectively it is applied to a website. The term gets thrown around a lot but when it comes to implementing the proper standards and practices, businesses fall short on these grounds.
By following the above mentioned practices, you will get closer to achieving better rank on the web. SEO takes time but through on-going improvements, the rewards are definitely worth the effort.
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