Whether you own a small online business or you’re well expanded in the real world and need proper online placement, you need to make sure that your services are easily found when searched in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo! and others. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) represents the most significant way to be noticed in search engines. In other words, proper SEO will improve your search engine’s results page (SERP) ranking.
Now, analyse this:
- Content marketing leads to a 2000% increase in blog traffic and 40% in revenue.
- 75% of search users never go past the first page.
- 93% of online users on internet begin with a Search Engine.
- 91% internet users use search engines.
- The search engine industry is estimated at $65 billion USD.
- Globally, over 1.2 trillion searches are done each month.
- Almost 18% clicks go to number 1 rank website in search engine.
- SEO leads give a 14.6% close rate compared to the 1.7% of direct mails or print media.
- Search beats social media in bringing traffic to content sites by 300%
- 81% businesses agree that blogs have played an important role as a traffic booster.
- Sites that blog have 434% more indexed pages which in turn gets more leads.
How well SEO investments pay off is quite evident from these facts and figures. Hiring a real SEO expert can tremendously boost results and skyrocket your website traffic.
A problem made simple with easy, clear sentences
Many websites will tell you that SEO is something quite tricky, with the recommendation of hiring an SEO expert included. It’s actually quite simple, except that you don’t get immediate results. SEO is how you properly raise a website, so it’s needless to say that it takes some time for it to fully take effect. SEO is a long-term investment that always pays off when done properly.
The ever growing danger of dirty business on the web
SEO consists of a multitude of factors, all of which eventually come down to the same thing: legitimate traffic increase. Because of today’s numerous strategies for exploiting the internet for the sake of increasing your visitors, including fake websites that link to yours, meaningless blogs with tags, shortened spam URLs, etc. (widely known as black hat SEO), Google has developed a filter for all the misleading content which instantaneously tracks down the culprit website and lowers its SERP ranking. This is why legitimacy is an irreplaceable SEO factor and your entire strategy depends on it.
The great wonders of the social world
Besides providing an attractive business profile to your customers, social networking has the most significant impact on your SEO. In spite of popular belief, having a solid daily income of visitors doesn’t necessarily mean your social media profile provides steady SEO, as Google takes some particular things into account more than the rest.
Make sure your ‘About’ section is filled out and that it includes terms and phrases related to what your consumers would type into the search box in order to find you. Include your address, city, state and zip code as this is also highly relevant for local searches, while customising your Facebook URL is a must. Make sure to avoid the mistake of creating a Facebook profile instead of a Facebook page, as well as using anything other than your business’s name.
Constantly tweeting about new contents of your website and providing links that lead to it is closely related to SEO, as it lets Google index (add to database) your URLs faster. You should also include keywords related to your website, in the form of valid sentences (not tags).
- Google+
As it is directly owned by Google, it is unnecessary to explain why it’s important. Spending 10 minutes a day on sharing your content on your Google+ Business Page significantly increases your SERP ranking. It also provides the option of adding a few customised links to your profile, meaning you can create a direct link between Google’s own social network and your website, Facebook/Twitter page, blog, etc. The same ‘About’ section rules apply.
- Local Google+
This differentiates from the original Google+ page in terms of interactivity and usefulness. Google’s research tells us that over 97% of consumers surf the web for local businesses, meaning this is the number one provider of customers within your vicinity, and as they open your Local Google+ page, your SEO gains a boost with every click. Fill out your address, phone number, hours and, of course, the ‘About’ section.
Make your dream create your spotlight
Taking care of the seemingly insignificant details of your website when developing it plays a key role in boosting your SEO. These are easily and often overlooked.
- URLs
Google loves a clean read, and so do the visitors. This means you should come up with words instead of numbers or scrambled letters when creating the URLs of your pages. This shouldn’t include anything but words that are relevant to the content of the page itself. For example, if your page is about African wildlife, your URL shouldn’t be a bunch of random characters, like “yoursite.com/pages/63f18d274”, but something that makes more sense to Google, like “yoursite.com/pages/african-wildlife”. What’s in this case considered illegitimate and misleading is the use of tags and basically anything else that hasn’t got much to do with the page itself.
- Titles
Perfect title optimisation is favoured by Google and thus directly impacts your SERP. The ideal length of your title tag is under 55 characters, as that’s the amount Google shows (as much as you can fit into a 512-pixel display). It should be H1-wrapped, along with the target keyword mentioned in it.
- Authority
This marks the most direct influence on SEO. It is determined by website to website interaction, either through links from other websites to your own (inbound), or from your website to other ones (outbound). The higher the traffic and SEO of the websites your inbound and outbound links lead to and fro are, the more authority your website obtains.
- Keyword optimisation
Thanks to one of the latest Google’s indexing technologies, LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), it is now even easier to place your website into the search engine exactly the way you want. This means that the most commonly used words and phrases on your website will determine the words used to locate it, allowing you to further customise where your website is placed by accommodating its content to Google’s analysis.
- Images
Naming your picture before you upload it to your business social channel may seem completely irrelevant, so most users go with their random names, usually consisting of unrelated numbers. This is a mistake, because image SEO is a thing. Google indexes every image you upload, meaning you can search for its name in the image section of Google and it will pop right up, hence why its name should always be related to the content of your page, in context with what you are using it for.
Making your sacrifice on the way to success
These SEO basics should give you a clear picture of what it is and how it works, but you should always keep in mind that implementing these strategies doesn’t provide results overnight. Only constant improvement of your SEO factors can contribute to gradual SERP ranking increase. However tedious this craft may appear to be, it is currently the one and only effective way of achieving the desired web spotlight. Remember that the main definition of SEO is “If it’s easy and fast, you are doing it wrong.”