No matter whether you have been in online marketing for years or you are new to it, you must know the importance of SEO and well-planned SEO strategies to get better results.
SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it is a practice to improve a site’s ranking in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is about improving the ranking and visibility of a website or webpage in search engine result pages.
In other words, you optimized the URL, Title tag, Meta description, and content of your website in such a way that it overall improves your ranking search engines.
SEO has many aspects within it. For example, On-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO, whitehat, blackhat, gray-hat SEO, etc.
The main role of SEO is to boost your ranking that helps getting more traffic which ultimately helps in the conversion of users into customers.
On-Page SEO
On-page or On-site SEO is about optimizing all the online features and aspects of your website or webpage.
Now, what are these on-site aspects of your site? These on-site features are your URL, Title tag, Meta descriptions, content, keywords, H1 tags, Sitemap, Images, etc.
On-page optimization is about optimizing all these key aspects of your website in order to make it useful and SEO friendly. On-page plays a very important part while planning your SEO strategies.
Off-page SEO
Off-page or off-site SEO is about optimizing all the offline aspects of your website. For example building backlinks, social media marketing, checking shares and likes, guest blogging, influencer marketing, etc.
Off-page SEO is about building the domain authority of your site and promoting its various platforms. Which helps in increasing traffic to your site and ranking google results.
What should be your SEO strategies?
Submit a Sitemap
Let’s say you have a website but Google doesn’t know that your site exists or not. That is why building a sitemap on your site helps Google to crawl and index all of your webpages. A sitemap is consists of all the URLs your site has.
Robot.txt Files
What if you have certain pages on your site that you don’t want to be crawled by Google. How do you do it? The answer is creating a Robot.txt file in your site’s root directory.
If you have certain pages that you think might not be good for ranking factors or any other reasons, then a Robot.txt file will help you.
URL, Title, and Meta Tags
URLs are a very important ranking factor. You should keep URLs short and make sure to add your targeted keyword in it.
The title tag should be attractive and catchy. The length of your title should be about 65 characters and make sure to add the keyword at the beginning of your title tag.
Meta description helps increase click-through rate and thus more traffic to your site. Make it good and precise and add a keyword in the meta description.
Content
Content is the most important part of your website. It is the backbone of your site and webpages. Optimizing your content is very important for ranking factors and good user experience.
Fist of all quality of your content matters. It is the first and the most thing which helps users to come and stay on your site.
Second keywords and their density in your content. Gone are the days when you could do keyword stuffing. Now with new updates by Google, you can face penalties for this.
Keyword Research
Doing proper keyword research for your website or business is the key part of SEO. Your targeted keywords decide if your site is going to rank high or low.
You can use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Ubbersuggest, SEMrush, Keyword Tool, etc. These tools help you find the search volume and competition of keywords. So you can target the right type of keyword that has low competition. This is one of the most important SEO strategies that will help you get better results.
You should always target either long tail or medium tail keywords. Because small tail keywords have high search volume so does high competition. Long-tail keywords tend to rank higher nowadays.
Optimized H1 tags
You should always use headings and sub-headings in your content. It helps users and Google robots to understand the structure of your content.
You should always add your targeted keywords in H1 and H2 tags whenever possible.
Image Optimization
You can not overlook the importance of images in SEO. Images are a very important part of your content. You should always use alt tags while uploading your images. And also add keywords in alt tags and image description.
Use Structured Data Markup
Structured data is a code that you can add to your site which helps Google to understand the content and structure of your website more better.
The star reviews and rich snippets are very useful for users and Google.
Backlinks
Backlinks are a very important part of building your domain and page authority. The more backlinks your site has, especially quality backlinks can increase your ranking in no time.
The ration of do-follow links to no-follow links must be perfect. The focus should be do-follow links as they pass authority. However, you can not ignore no-follow links.
Responsive Design
Your website should open on any device, be it desktop or mobile phones. Because nowadays the majority of people use mobile phones or tabs. If your website is not mobile-friendly then it will cost you big time.
Page speed
Page speed is important as it affects the user experience and performance of your site. If your webpage takes ages to load it will increase the bounce rate to your site.
To improve the page speed you should compress the size of your images and use jpeg format. This affects the page speed of your webpage.
You should decrease redirects on your site and optimize your CSS and HTML codes.
Conclusion
SEO plays a very important for boosting traffic to a website and thus improving the conversion rate and generating more revenue.
You learned about some of the most important and useful SEO strategies that can help you increase your site’s ranking and visibility if implemented the right way.