Do you remember playing the game “Where’s Waldo”? Waldo is a cartoon character who appears hidden in drawings among a large number of other characters. It takes a lot of attention and a good eye to spot Waldo in each scene.
What is the connection between a cartoon game and the SEO for your website? Well, your site IS Waldo in today’s online landscape. It is one of a million other websites. Even for small and specific industry niches, your website is still one of the thousands of sites that offer similar products and services to the same group of customers.
The problem is that the customers are not looking for your website specifically. They will click on the first Google result they get and do business with that company. If they are not happy with it, there are nine more options on the first page of Google search results. They are highly unlikely to go beyond that. A standard joke among SEO specialists is that the best place to hide a dead body is on the second page of Google search results.
What Does SEO Do for Your Website?
Alright, so how do you get your site to appear on the first page of Google results? If money is no object, you can bid hundreds of dollars for a keyword, just like giants like Apple, Coca-Cola, or Nike.
If your business is not a financial match for these contenders, you invest money in SEO, that is, Search Engine Optimization. First of all, you must understand that SEO is not Harry Potter’s magic wand: you do not get on the first page of Google overnight.
Good SEO practices involve:
• Proper maintenance of your website
• Searching for the right keywords
• Continually updating your site with fresh, original content
• Making your website easy to find by Google spiders (they are not real spiders, but pieces of code which crawl websites collecting keywords);
• Making your website content easy to share on social media.
Another issue you must remember is that you are never done with SEO work. You can never say “My website has the SEO working fine, I can forget about it.” Google keeps changing its page ranking algorithms, and you have to adapt to these changes. Other competitors start using the same keywords that you use. New website platform releases appear, and you need to keep your website up to date with them.
These being said let us take a look at the most helpful ten ways in which you can boost the SEO for your website:
10 Surefire Ways to Boost the SEO for Your Website
1. Make Your Website Mobile Ready
Starting with 2015, Google has introduced a new criterion for page ranking: whether the site is mobile ready. What does this mean? It means that its design adapts to the screen size of the device used by the website visitor and allows them to browse the menu and read the content with ease.
Responsive web design is the name of the web design principle which makes web pages offer optimal browsing experiences on any connected device.
You can check at this link whether your website is mobile-ready.
2. Use Long Tail Keywords
No, you do not have to adopt a pet and let it help you manage the website.
Long-tail keywords contain various qualifier words which makes them more specific. For example, “leather shoes” is a general keyword. “Handmade women’s leather shoes in Brooklyn” is a long-tail keyword.
Long-tail keywords help you compete with larger companies and also help you find customers in your local area. After all, if you sell handmade women’s leather shoes in Brooklyn, you are not looking for customers in California or Asia.
3. Create Inbound Links
Inbound links are links that appear in a piece of content on your website and lead to another page still on your site. For example, if you speak of the way you make the handmade shoes in the blog section of your website, an inbound link will take the web visitor to your catalog page where they can select a shoe.
4. Use SEO Plugins
An SEO plugin is a piece of software that helps you fill in all the information you need for each page of your website to make it easy to find by Google. These categories are:
- Page title
- Meta description
- H1, H2, and H3 tags
- Alt text for images
It is much easier to let the plugin add the necessary text fields to the backend of your website than create them manually (which needs programming skills).
5. Add Quality Outbound Links
Outbound links are links inside your site that point to other websites. For example, the handmade shoe website can have outbound links to consumer protection websites, to the Better Business Bureau page showing the business rank, etc.
The more trustworthy the outbound link is, the higher your own page rank, so make sure that you add only quality and reliable outbound links to your website.
6. Add Social Sharing Buttons
Social sharing buttons help tremendously, not only to expose your brand image to new audiences but also for SEO. If you perform a Google search, you will notice Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube links among the results.
Google is now indexing social media content, as well, so every piece of content on your website which is shared on social media will also appear in Google search results.
7. Update Your Website Frequently
Google will also look at the frequency with which you add content to your website. It can be anything:
• New photos or videos
• New products
• Blog article
The important thing is to perform such updates frequently. Otherwise, Google will demote your website, believing that it is abandoned.
8. Fix Broken Links
In some instances, you edit the URL of a web page to include a new keyword. Once you have done this, you must search for all the references pointing to the old URL and update them.
There are several free tools that can help identify broken links on your website.
9. Submit Your Sitemap to Google
A sitemap is a hierarchical structure of all the pages on your website. Creating and submitting it to Google will help the search engine index your site faster and better.
Here is a a step by step guide to creating and submitting your sitemap to Google.
10. Avoid Duplicate Content
It seems more natural to copy/paste an older blog post to an article directory or any other website and boost your SEO, than writing a brand new one. Resist this temptation!
Google penalizes duplicate content and the webmasters of sites where you may post guest articles check each submission with specialized software. You will lose your page rank and even become blacklisted for infringing copyrights (even if the original text belongs to you)
Do you have other tips to improve SEO for a website? We love to hear from you. Do not hesitate to drop your comments below.
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