SEO or Search engine optimisation is a well articulated process to gain traffic for every website with richness and relevance in content and links. The process itself considers the basics of website management to leverage the organic, editorial, natural or free search results on different search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. Although each search engine have their own capabilities in the form of search algorithms that crawl content and links more accurately to search key words, it is imperative to share the basics.
Besides, more efforts would be required to track the competitive nature of every relevant website for a concerned marketer in order to ensure SEO stays valuable as a marketing tactic. Zero spend on search engine is what SEO again lets marketers achieve if formulated and executed as a strategy.
SEO can be studied well through a basic step by step guide for a new website. I like how Search engine land has explained this through the below headings.
1. Words matter
Any user on search engine comes with an intent to search for information that has the potential to create a result for your website, eventually lead to a visit or a transaction by the user. However, your website cannot be easily discoverable if those key words used are not well understood or evaluated, and NOT infused in your sites. A keyword research process is always a smart move to do while deciding on the content. Hence, using the right words can give it an edge over search results while the search engine accounts for any word thats highly relevant to a user.
If a user search for 'Hotels in South Bangalore', which is common for any traveller exploring a place to stay it is critical for the hotel websites to factor in these key words for Google.
2. Title matters
A website normally carries titles and meta descriptions which is typically coded however if the words on website used to explain the title or meta info is compromised, a marketer will still lose out on giving it a search mileage.
A title that miss out on communication to Google what the website is all about or how they can be backed with more details and insights, will end up the website being pushed to a 7th or 8th page on the search engine. In the context of a hotel website again, they will have to give a strong and relevant title stating what kind of a hotel it is whether a budget or premium and the description associated to it for search engine to recognise it as appropriate.
3. Links matter and the words on them
Something more critical to SEO is to ensure that the website carry links to direct users to the landing page that they are expected to explore. These links will direct ideally to category or product pages that will give users more in-depth information likely to be important and interesting for making decisions.
In the case of a hotel website, giving a link like 'Rooms', followed by information or booking page of every type of distinct room will lead to better results as its giving more choice to users to not leave and visit other website. Search engine will give more weightage to such websites thus improving the search rankings.
4. Reputation
Like mentioned earlier SEO is all about management and hence it require consistency in bringing fresh quality content and link building efforts. Undoubtedly, marketers having a long term framework to improve reputation will be clear winners who apply SEO.
More content focused activities like blogs, videos, infographics, podcasts, tutorials, webinar links are all ways to attain benchmark outcomes through SEO. Subsequently it takes a holistic approach to improve and maintain a website's reputation.
The below table with success factors will explain the SEO best practices with more conviction as I've understood the basic of SEO.
Sharing a checklist that can help a new website.
SEO works on primarily three aspects of the website - On page elements as explained above, Off page that works on the external link building efforts and technical factors like site indexing, site speed and server related problems.
On page checklist
1. Min 500 words high quality, fresh and relevant content.
2. Include target search lines on page headlines,sub-headlines, images or other visuals and captions on images/tools.
3. Content should be error free from spelling mistakes, grammatical errors as this may get penalised by search engine. It should also be reader friendly as too much of key words may get downgraded as spam.
4. Location based optimising should be included in the content or separately as page footer.
5. Social media connectors, forums or discussion plug in to give the site more momentum as this will definitely improve optimisation and score high ranking .
6. To ensure that coding factors are favourable include target keyword, search phrase on page URLs, title and meta description tags.
7. Links on content copy that can lead to other pages, however having more than 100 links on a single page will be penalised again by search engines.
8. Mobile focused coding also will help search engines recognise it as mobile responsive and the site gets visibility on mobile devices as we
Off page checklist
1. Evaluate the inbound links and its value through tools like Open site explorer.
2. Check out the different inbound links, top-linked pages, anchor text other sites use, and competition insights.
3. Fetch all those high value links to direct to your website or similar links for search engines to recognise and facilitate search results.
4. Explore off site link opportunity from various partners sites, press releases, social media ads/pages, own blogs, directories, influencer posts/whitepaper and any relevant sites.
4. Build this gradually and not in bulk as Google can penalise again for over doing it, a team to monitor this can attain results in the long-run.
Technical factors
1. Confirm the indexing done for your sites. If the same is not done then rankings will be affected from the search results.
2. Assess the site speed and server responsiveness through Google tools like Pagespeed and Webmaster. SEO works well for high sped sites and those with low server problems.
3. Correct broken links by checking out cases that's critical for traffic and eliminating those that lead to penalising by google again. Tools like brokenlinkcheck comes in handy here.
There are lot more in-depth tactics to be followed as hands on but these can serve as basics of them all.
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