You don’t need to be the best company for SEO to tackle some of the basic strategies. Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential to any marketing strategy. It helps search engines determine which websites should appear in search results. When people search for something, they will most likely type it into Google or another search engine. So, if you want your website to show up in a high position, you must ensure that it has good SEO.
Today I will discuss SEO fundamentals and what you should consider if you want to optimize your own website.
Keyword Research
First, every good SEO foundation is made with keyword research. Keywords are essentially the words someone would type into a search engine to find your business.
For example, as a web designer, I’d expect my potential customers to type “local web designers” or “who builds websites for small businesses?” As you can see, some keywords are just three words, and others are full sentences.
Google will take the query or keywords typed into the search engine and find the website that best fits the needs and intentions of the searcher. Google will check your website against those of your competitors, inspect that the keyword is present on your site and that you are close enough to the searcher to help.
There are two main ways to research keywords: manually and with tools. Manual keyword research involves typing a list of words related to your business into a spreadsheet and then analyzing the data.
Tools such as Google Adwords allow you to enter a few keywords and see how many people use those search terms. You can also use tools like SEMRush to find popular keywords and analyze competitor websites to see what keywords work for them. Keyword research will take time and effort, but if done correctly will help you clearly guide your future SEO strategy.
Backlinks
Backlinks are links pointing back to your website from other websites. These links are an indication of popularity and authority. If you have a lot of high-quality backlinks, you will likely rank higher than competitors who do not.
When building your site, you want to ensure it has relevant backlinks from the most authoritative websites. In general, backlinks are generally classified into three categories:
- Trustworthy – These are links from websites that people trust.
- Informational – These are links from websites that have content of relevance to you.
- Paid – These are links from websites that have paid for them. Paid backlinks generally cost money and can be achieved in various ways, such as through link exchanges or by paying for high-ranking organic listings on search engines. You can buy keywords through a Google AdWords campaign and paid listings on other search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines.
Site Structure & Click Depth
Site architecture is the way you structure your website. Even the best company for SEO can spend a lot of time mapping a site’s structure. A well-organized website makes it easy for users to find the information they need quickly. This is accomplished through user experience design, clear navigation, and a shallow click depth.
Ideally any page on your site should be only 3 to 4 clicks away from the homepage. That means if you have a website with hundreds of pages, you still need to work to make all of those pages easy to find within just a few clicks.
Page Speed
You must ensure your site loads quickly to improve your search engine rankings. Page speed is a very important ranking factor for Google, as it looks at how long visitors have to wait before they can access each page on your site. Site speed can also affect the user experience.
This means making sure that your site has a fast loading speed. Remember, over 50% of people are accessing the internet through a mobile phone. That means the user may try to access your site from a low signal mobile network from time to time.
If your site hasn’t been optimized to load quickly, you will not show up at the top of search results. There are several ways to speed up your website, such as using optimizing images, and videos when necessary, lazy loading, and reducing the number of files on your server.
Mobile Friendliness
You should also make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. As I stated in the earlier point, over 50% of users access the internet from a mobile phone. Mobile friendliness will ensure that users can easily access your site while browsing the web on their smartphones.
Mobile responsive websites are easily readable when viewed on a smartphone, tablet, or desktop computer. Many website designers are using “mobile-first design” which means they actually design the mobile website first, and then plan what the website will look like on a desktop computer.
Summary
These are just a few of the best company strategies for SEO. You will need to do more than just these steps to get to the top of search engine results pages. However, these steps are the foundation of any SEO campaign. Remember, first and foremost, that your website should help your users, and SEO can supplement your great content.