Whenever you have a question, chances are you turn to Google to look for answers. As it turns out, most B2B clients and consumers do the same. That’s why it’s important to make sure you should on search results and to ensure that, you need search engine optimization for your site.
Before going out and hiring an SEO consultant, have a look at these SEO tips for beginners to learn about some important factors that you need to consider. If you keep these in mind, you can help ensure that you have effective search ending optimization applied to your website.
Technical Setup
For your website to rank, a search engine does 3 things: it finds your page, it scans it to understand topics and keywords, and then adds it to its index – a database of all the content it’s found on the web.
It may seem simple but there’s a catch. Search engines don’t see websites the way we do and only see them as text. That’s where technical setup or on-site optimization comes in. This allows Google to scan and index them without any problems. Here are factors that affect this.
Website navigation and links
Search engines crawl sites like we do – they follow links and use that to find other content. Since they can only see text, navigation of your site should be text-only.
Simple URL
Keep your URL simple and include the main keyword you want that page to be optimized for. Search engines don’t like reading long strings of words with complex structure.
Page Speed
How fast your site loads is a big indicator of quality user experience and Google considers this too. Many web elements affect this such as image size. A good SEO tip for beginners is using Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool.
Sitemap and Robots.txt
A sitemap is a simple file that lists all the URLs on your site that search engines use to figure out what pages to crawl and index. On the other hand, Robots.txt is a file that indicates what content not to index – like policy pages you don’t want to appear in search. Having both will speed up crawling and indexing of content.
Content
The next major area, and the easiest one to notice, is the content on your page. The main reason why we use search engines is to look for information and answers to our questions. On-page content is what gives us those answers and is thus a big factor in search engines showing your site to people searching on Google.
For search engine optimization, content helps increase search visibility. The more you publish, the greater chances you have of being found online. Content is also a primary way search engines determine how to rank a page – by evaluating how relevant it is to a search term. Such is the case with SEO services for real estate that rely on frequently publishing content about their services or the properties they deal with.
Optimizing content means doing proper keyword research. By researching what keywords your target audience is using on Google, you can integrate these keywords within your site and content to improve its relevance. This signals search engines to show your pages when people look for the keywords you’ve chosen.
Be sure to include at least your main keyword in these parts of pages:
- Post’s title
- URL
- H1 Tag
- The first 100 words of content
- Meta-title and meta-description tags
Links
The last area of focus is linking. When we talk about links, we don’t simply mean adding links to external sites or other pages in your site – although these also help Google determine your topic and provide a better user experience.
In search engine optimization, links, or backlinks, are references to your content on other sites. When another website mentions your content, you gain a backlink. Google uses the quantity and quality of links to signal a website’s authority.
Because of the importance of backlinks, link building is another important aspect of SEO. There are many ways to do this but is out of the scope of this article.
Start ranking today!
While you can start your SEO efforts on your own, getting results is more certain and can be quicker with the right SEO consultant. Get your website to the top of SERPs with Top Results Consulting. Get in touch with us today and see how you can improve your website.
