It's not a debate if your search engine optimization strategies works well, the end result will be more customer and increase in revenue for your business. To make this happen, you'll need to focus some time and resources and build your SEO strategy over a period of time to rain in more traffic to your website.
The key here is to find keywords that best matches your potential customer intent and focus on optimizing them on your website and off-page.
The best ways to get your site ranking will be creating impeccable content and having that content link to by other sites (backlinking). You also have to understand that, Google considers numerous ranking factors in order to rank your site for targeted keywords.
Here are some basic factors to consider before you embark on your SEO journey:
1. Branding Using Your Domain Name
Once you've thought about your domain name, make sure you can brand it for your business. Examples of effective branding includes; Box, Google, Facebook, Amazon.
These brands have built a cult following and have excelled on building a reputation around their brand name. Unless you have to, avoid using names that are long but content your target keywords. Creating a brand around your keywords will not move the needle today.
2. Minimalist Web Design
Keep your website design minimalist as possible. Don't complicate the navigation of your site to make it cool. In most cases, your site speed will be slow and you will lose visitors over time due to accessibility. All you need is a clean website with clear information and call to actions propositions that help your visitors take actions.
3. Your Web Page Title
To make sure you are representing the right page, the page title should be in the sites Title tag and at the top of every page. Make sure each page keeps a unique title that focusing on it's content. To help improve your SEO, make sure to keep your title length under 70 characters but no less than letters.
4. Website URL Structure
Make you URL's search engine friendly. Make sure to know the difference between a static url and a dynamic url. Focus on only static url's for you most important pages.
Example:
Static url
https://www.backlinkfy.com/news
Dynamic url
https://www.backlinkfy.com/news/marketing/digital
5. Your Website Directory Structure
You site directory is what helps search engines navigate your site and understand your content. Pages closer to the homepage of your site, will get more priority from search engines than pages below 3 levels. If you can, avoid using sub-directories for your valuable content or pages.
6. Hyphens In Your Directory Files
Create unique directory file names and use hyphens, not underscores to separate words within your directory and site file names. Most search engines parse a hyphen like a reader would parse a space. Using underscores makes How_To_Be_A_marketer look like "HowToBeAmarketer" to most search engines. keep you keywords separated in your URL too.
7. Description META Tag
You sites pages description meta tags should never be ignored. Use no more than 150 characters including spaces and punctuation. Your description should be a keyword rich, complete sentence, so it shows up on search engines as readable, include your keywords strategically within your sentence.
8. WWW or not www and HTTP: or HTTPS:
What will you use for your website. A lot of website forgo the WWW altogether - that's a bad idea. Make sure your url looks like this:
https://www.backlinkfy.com
Not
http://backlinkfy.com
This are 2 different urls, and can affect your website significantly. You make that judgment and go with your gut.
9. Site Heading Tags On All Pages
Your site heading tags should be used appropriately (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6) wherever possible and should be structured in order of hierarchy.
10. Effective Keyword META Tag
Using your keyword meta tag should not be ignored. Google doesn't consider this factor anymore by weight but other search engines like Yahoo and Bing search still do. If the keyword doesn’t appear at least twice in the page then it shouldn’t go in the Keyword META Tag. Also, try to limit the number of total keywords to under twenty in your keyword meta tag.
11. ALT Tags Cannot Be Ignored
Your website has images, so out them to use for your SEO. Add image ALT tags with focus on your keywords or the text on the images with you'll like to rank for those keywords.
12. Creating Content That Connects
Creating quality over quantity should be your goal. Having pages of original, relevant content is the best form of search engine optimization and will help your site rank for those keywords being targeted.
13. Keep You website Fresh Often
Every new content that goes on your site indicates how fresh your site is being kept. With new unique fresh content regularly, this will give search engine spiders and crawlers a reason to keep coming back day in and day out to index you pages to their database for ranking.
14. Every Page Should Have A Navigation Menu
Make your site user friendly by placing or showing your navigation menu on all pages on your website. The navigation should be linked to your valuable pages and also linked back to you top page "you website homepage".
15. Site Robots META Tag
This helps control what people see in search engine and what is crawl-able on your site. You can use a robots meta tag to block some pages on you site so it is completely out of sight from search engine crawlers.
Hopefully this tips will help you setup your website with structured best practices for ranking your site on search and driving the traffic to you door step the way you imagined. If you need assistance implementing any of these strategies, please get in touch with one of our SEO and Site experts.
Divine Tumenta is an entrepreneur and professional digital marketing expert based in Los Angeles. He has worked in digital marketing for more than 8 years. He is currently founder and CEO of backlinkfy.com and a go to consultant for startups and small businesses in the USA.
