Top 10 SEO Tips

Article by Pierre Zarokian.

Whether you’re trying to run a small/large business or simply gain reputation, SEO is vital. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and with it, a website will generate much more traffic, which in turn will create much more sales and visits to your website. Using SEO will boost your ‘ranking’, basically meaning you are going to be closer to the top of the Google search results. Everyone knows that people click on the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd result when they search for something. Now that you know how important SEO is, here are 10 SEO Tips to get you started.

1. Make sure your site is crawlable.

Every search engine uses robots known as ‘crawlers’ – also known as ‘spiders’, these crawlers search the internet regularly to index websites. As every single search engine uses crawlers, it is important to understand how they work. In order to have good SEO, you have to first make sure all your sites can be tracked by these spiders. Now that you understand how crawlers work, you have to make sure that all the pages on your website can be accessed by these crawlers. To track this, use the Google Search Console and enter your website’s domain(you may have to sign up for an account).

2. Sitemaps

A sitemap is basically a road map that helps a crawler know how your site works, and how your pages relate to each other. Using one will help the crawler index your site better. 

This page should basically have a directory of all your pages.Once you have created your sitemap, you can submit it into Google using their Google Search Console Tool. As a final note, do not forget to leave out no index pages from your site on the sitemap. These may be pages that can help a user experience, but don’t have much content for a crawler to see.

3.Decide which keywords to use to cater to your audience

In order to keep an audience interested, you have to know what they want. There is no better way to figure this out than to simply ask them. What were they searching for before they found your website? Knowing these things will help you decide what more you should put on your website, and what will draw in more people like your already-existing audience. Now that you know what your audience is looking for, you should figure out what keywords you should put on our website.  Keywords are the terms that encompass what your content is about. Luckily, there are a number of tools that can help you decide what keywords to use. One, for example, is the Google Keyword Planner, which is a part of Google Ads. Simply put in some words that your audience is already searching for, and it will recommend you what other words you should use, and which ones bring the most traffic. In order to decide which words to use, you should start off with long keywords that get at least some traffic. Also, you have to remember that keywords with High Competition will be very hard to rank for, especially for a new site. Finally, if you’re a local business, it may be a good idea to include local keywords that include your city name(e.g. Web design in Los Angeles). Even if you’re a national business, consider adding these city names to get traffic from these places.  There are also some paid tools for keyword research, which may have free versions and free trials. You should also check them out, including SEMRush, Ahrefs, KeywordSpy and Spyfu.

4. Social Media

As a business, it is important to have social media pages. Using the largest platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, these pages are likely to help build your own reputation. Your media page should be representative of what you do, and link to your own website. Using social media is good because as so many of these sites are so popular, they are very likely to appear in the search results when someone searches for you. Furthermore, these platforms are all search engines themselves. Many will search for businesses on these social media platforms, and it is important to be able to gain attraction from anywhere. Social media activity and brand mentions is also thought to be a ranking factor in Google. 

5.Adding keywords to your website.

Having keywords is great- now where do you put them? There are certain spots on your website that will give you the best chances of ranking. 

To begin, the TITLE tag is THE MOST IMPORTANT place to put keywords. Any crawler will pay the most attention to it, so make sure to put your best and most important keywords here. There is a limit to how many words you can put in here, however, so make sure the ones you put are the strongest words that directly explain what you are/what you do. The best length for this would be from 8 to 12 words.

Next, the META tag. This is the page description that appears under your page title in the search results. Words you put in the meta tag are not considered in your rankings. This is mainly for the human audience to see what your page is really about, so this is just as important, if you want people to click on your site. 

Third, the site’s content, or body. This is the content itself that is actually on your site, and a great place to put your keywords. This is a good time to mention that ‘putting your keywords’ does not mean simply copy pasting your words into your page, putting it everywhere. We mean that you should use your keywords in your content. Overall, your content should sound natural, while also using your keywords.

6. Use of Relevant Content

This tip is quite obvious – your site should have content that applies to your audience and what they’re looking for. If you have unrelated content on your page, your page-visitors will not be pleased, and less likely to come to your site again. As much as SEO helps you gain rankings and more clicks, it is just as important to keep your visitors on your site. Don’t use unrelated keywords: if you do, your website could be marked as spam. Also, avoid keywords that are related to adults or drugs, as that could also hurt your chance of being ranked. Remember:  Only try to rank for things that are related to what you do.  

7.Care about your website’s speed.

It is clear that Google likes fast sites: they have said it themselves. There are multiple ways of doing this, but overall, they all focus on removing useless content. Adding content that is not needed will slow down your website. Especially with images, you should make sure to not make them any bigger than they are supposed to be, and not use them when unnecessary. Images are the number one reason for slow site speed. 

A good way of doing this is Google Page Insights. Simply pasting your page URL into this will give you a surplus of information based on your site speed and analytics. It will give you statistics for both mobile and desktop users, as it is important to be optimized for both of those. They will also give you an overall score that tells you whether your site is Very Fast, Decent, or Slow. 

Link – https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

8.Constantly release fresh content.

Just like site speed, Google also likes sites that are constantly updated. Keeping your page fresh with new content will be an important factor in gaining good SEO. Because this is something that is so obvious that it is important, you should keep updating your page, at least every week or so, no questions asked: It can only help.

A great way of doing this is to start a blog on a page on your site. If you start a blog, it is much easier to keep updates coming to your site. They can be articles, or something that provides insight on a topic. If you don’t know how much to post, a good place to start is about 1-4 articles monthly.

9.Be Mobile Friendly

Anyone knows that nowadays, more than half the people on the internet are accessing it through a phone. Therefore, it is important to make sure your site is mobile friendly. A page is mobile friendly if a mobile user can access all the content and functionality as someone on a computer can. Doing so will gain you more and more audience and traffic, since so many people are mobile now. 

A great tool to use is the Google Mobile-Friendly Test. Pasting your URL into this tool will give you loads of information about if your site is mobile friendly. It will give you an overall assessment, for example, “Page is mobile friendly”. It will also reveal any specific issues it may have run into, whether it be how fast it is or if there were loading issues.

10.Backlinks

Of course, SEO is not only about onsite factors. Things like backlinks and social media presence are just as important. To start off, a backlink is created when one website links to another. It is important because it shows the crawlers from Google that one site trusts another, and that could greatly improve one’s rankings. Of course, simply gaining a backlink from a random site is not going to do much for you. The best backlinks come from sites that are high-traffic and trustworthy. Getting a guest blog post, for example, on a news website will do wonders for your own rankings. On the other hand, everyone should stay away from backlinks from spammy sites. These sites are low-authority, and they could even potentially  hurt your rankings if you’re on them. You can do your own research by using tools like moz.com, Majestic, Ahrefs, and SEMRush. Using these tools will allow you to see the links your own site has, as well as look into potential sites to ask for backlinking.

Conclusion

Using keywords is great, but simply filling your entire page with keywords isn’t going to get you very far. It is important to not get caught up in catering to a site crawler – you have to remember you have an audience. A good rule of thumb is to focus on your human audience: doing so will also automatically cater to the crawlers.

Article by Pierre Zarokian, CEO of Submit Express, an SEO company from Los Angeles. Pierre Zarokian is an expert in digital marketing, social media marketing, SEO, Google ads and reputation management.

, , , ,