SEO always seemed one of the most mysterious practices on the internet up to the point when people just stop trying to deal with it on their own and pay various agencies to make their website search engine friendly.
Of course, if you have enough money it is always a great idea to give your website optimization to the professionals in order to ensure it’s accordance to the highest standards, but what most of the people are unaware of is that giving your website a solid SEO boost is not at all a Sysyphean toil and, more importantly, it can be done without any help from the outsource.
This is quite important to understand, especially when your website is only starting to take off and there is no spare money in your budget to waste.
So, let’s see what you can do to improve your search engine optimization.
KEYWORDS
You can hate them or you can love them, but they’re there. And they are extremely important for your website.
In short, keywords are words and phrases which you put in your content that make it possible for people to find your website or particular page with search engines. That means if you implemented keywords well, you will rank higher than your competitors on Search Engine Results Page, or SERP for short.
Finding the right keywords is quite a long process, which requires some time and dedication. That is because while searching for the right keywords you’re not just trying to understand which ones suit you the most, you are also figuring the thoughts of your audience and how would they search for the solution of their problem on the search engine.
That is why your first and most important step would be conducting keyword research which will help you understand your niche and what exactly do internet users are searching for in it. You can do it with various keyword researching tools and services, both free and paid, such as Ahrefs.
Get creative here, don’t forget that your goal is to outsmart and outperform your competitors. Don’t use the keywords with high keyword difficulty with which it will be hard to score higher in SERP. Use humbler keywords that will benefit you in the long run.
Make sure that they are relevant and used sparingly throughout your content. Don’t abuse keyword usage, as it is heavily penalised by Google. Place them into the main high-attention areas of the website as titles, body text, meta description and the names of the image files.
Give a try to long tail keywords. They are search queries that consist of more than three words and due to bring quite a lot of traffic to the website. They are extremely helpful when it comes to optimizing a newly made site for search engines due to the low competitiveness and more targeting nature, as they are used by users when they are searching for something specific.
EXTERNAL LINK BUILDING & CONTENT MARKETING
Links are your bread and butter when it comes to SEO.
Your website can be optimized in the best way possible, but if you don’t have external sources linking to your site, you won’t be showing up in search results and, consequently, won’t get any traffic. That happens because link building is the major factor in how Google ranks web pages.
There are quite a lot of ways of getting links to your site. Once again, the main thing here is to be careful and not to overuse various techniques and sources.
One of the best and most effective ways of getting links is doing it through useful and interesting content.
By creating well-made, high quality, engaging content and spreading a word about it through various audiences on different resources that link to you can have an enormous effect on your traffic income and google ranking.
There are different ways and techniques of creating content which you can find, but the main things you should always keep in mind are relevancy and high-quality. They are a must for every piece of content and should always come together. Before writing a post, creating an image or an infographics ask yourself, how can I help my audience? And whether you are writing about a solution to some problem or advertising your product, never forget that it’s your audience who you write for.
Besides creating engaging content there are other ways of getting people to link to you. For example, you can get your partners or friends to place a link to you on their website in exchange for a link from you.
But don’t forget that links from random unrelated sites won’t have much value as Google is smart enough to track topic relevance, so make sure that resources that link to you are of the same industry or niche that you are in.
Last but not least, you can get links from influencers in your niche or on social media by reaching out to them and asking to advertise your product.
META DESCRIPTIONS AND HEADLINES
The headline and meta description of your page are the first things that internet users stumble upon on the search engine when they are searching for something. That is why making a great first impression is something that will improve your traffic quite reasonably.
They do not necessarily affect your ranking, but they sure do play their role in attracting the audience as they are helping people to understand whether to click on your result or not.
The amount of people making that click and going to your site is called click-through-rate(CTR), which is an important ranking factor.
That is why you ought to optimize the headline and meta description to improve it.
Let’s see what steps can you make to achieve better results.
First and the most obvious one, you should make it catchy and attractive for your targeted audience. Make the people curious and engaged, be sure that they will understand that you are the one who has the solution to their problem. Make sure it contains a real sneak-peak of the content on the web page, don’t try to mislead or lie, if the internet user will not see the needed information on your page, he will just leave and never come back again.
This occurrence, when people spend a few seconds on your page and leave it, is called Bounce rate, and it has quite a negative effect on your ranking, so watch out that the description and headline contain informative and, most importantly, genuine representation of the content on the web page.
Moreover, don’t forget to put your main keywords in the headline. When Google wants to know what your article is about, your headline would be the first thing it looks through.
But keep in mind that you should find the golden mean between optimizing the headline for SEO and your audience. Check out this amazing guide by Neil Patel where he explains some great points about writing a great headline.
CONCLUSIONS
These are only the starting points of your SEO journey and there is still quite a long way to go, but at the same time they are the essentials without which you can proceed to doing anything more substantial. Get creative with your SEO, never stop learning and experimenting. Every website is different and unique in a way, which means that you will have to develop your own, best way of optimizing yours to achieve better results. Take your time and work hard, implement these techniques well on your web pages, and you will inevitably see a drastic change in your ranking and incoming traffic.
I’m a marketing and seo enthusiast working in a young ambitious digital marketing team RGray based in Ukraine. I have a passion for making the most of every project and finding new ways and techniques to implement in my work, keeping track of every change and update that is happening in the internet world and providing the best content for the readers.