While there are a plethora of sophisticated techniques to optimize a webpage, there are some basic nitty-gritties for anyone trying to increase visibility and search rankings. They’re listed below, with the goal being to simplify an industry that needs to be simplified.
1. Content
Your website needs to have great content. This is the first and arguably most important point when discussing modern SEO. The reason is that it’s much easier to fill in the optimization spaces when the content is already where it needs to be. It’s much more difficult the other way around.If you have informative and actionable messages on your site that are relevant to your domain and audience, the keywords will fall into place. You won’t need to stuff the pages on your site with repetitive phrases like it’s Thanksgiving. They will fit naturally within the online puzzle you generate for your audience and the search engine robots.
Action advice: The first step to enhancing a website is to have quality content. After all, without legitimate material inside the walls of your domain, the end user and search engines will be disappointed. It’s easy for them to push you to the wayside in favor of the other thousand URLs covering your topic. Make it unique and make it natural. From there, optimize for keywords within the content skeleton you’ve built.
2. Genuine link profile
A main way that search engine algorithms rank websites is by assessing both the number and quality of links pointing to a particular domain. The backlink profile of your website should be genuine, meaning that the links your site is connected to are authoritative, well-dispersed and relevant. If you’re link building, only associate yourself with respected sites.It used to be effective to pay for manipulative link schemes that simply acquired as many links as possible, regardless of where they were housed. This is no longer the case, as Google and other major search engines are cracking down on the legitimacy of high ranking sites. If you want to rank and get known, you not only need to have quality links, but you need to get rid of the questionable ones.
Action advice: Links help search engines, and end users, better understand the internet landscape. If a user finds a link to your site on a relevant blog and clicks through to your landing page, you’ve succeeded.
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Similarly, search algorithms can better understand what to rank your site for if your links match up with your keywords, URL and content. Help everyone, including yourself, by making sure your link profile is genuinely constructed and maintained.
3. Efficient and pleasant user experience
Your website should be easy to explore, understand and share. After all, modern internet potential stems from these three ideas. A major component of maximizing the prominence of your website is to make the use of it an efficient and pleasant experience.SEO is meant to drive movement towards your landing pages, but if the traffic gets confused and turns around in your cul-de-sac of a website, you’re in trouble. Make sure that your web interface is not only glistening with fresh ideas and finely crafted content, but that it’s easily accessible and navigable from an onlooker’s perspective.
Action advice: The ability of a site to truly excel on the heels of an SEO strategy is dependent on the user experience that the resulting traffic enjoys. If it’s great, they’ll share it. If it’s not, they won’t. It’s simple.
Getting people to a site, whether business or personal, is only half the battle. It’s like opening the front door of a new grocery store. People flooding to the grand opening still need to shop, and if they aren’t impressed with what they see, they’ll move on.
SEO is more complicated than three letters. Sometimes it’s refreshing to take a step back. The industry is in place because major search engines dominate the distribution of people to information stored along the walls of the internet.
Start your journey by providing awesome content, housing a genuine link profile and fostering an enjoyable user experience. Everything else will fall into the margins.
Peter Buffington About the Author:
Peter Buffington is a journalism product from the University of Colorado at Boulder. When he’s not making peanut butter toast he writes for Page One Power, a provider of link building services.
