Search Engine Optimization or more popularly known, as SEO is one of the most popular marketing terms currently. Every business owner or brand is on a mission to chase that golden opportunity to be on the front page of Google. Lets be honest, the amount of users that search past the front page on Google drops off significantly. With the following 4 strategies, I will show you how to optimize your website to land on the front page of Google.
As a pre cursor, making it to the front page of Google isn’t a feat that is accomplished over night; otherwise any business or brand could do it. It takes constant work and testing with different keywords to make it happen. Let’s begin!
As mentioned, the SEO strategy is an extremely important factor to be considered for the build of the website. The search engine results page takes into account four important factors:
- Content
- Performance
- Authority
- User Experience
Create SEO optimized Content
The content that is on the website is extremely important when ranking for specific search terms in Google. I’m going to use the example of a skateboard shop in Vancouver to illustrate my point throughout. We’ll call it Pete’s Skateboard shop. Now that we have our establishment of choice, what keywords do we feel like consumers would search online? Most likely they’d search words like skateboards, long boards, penny boards, and even more, specific brands, location and colour with those keywords in it like a blue Burton long board in Vancouver. Especially for a small business that is just starting online, it will be difficult, more likely impossible, to rank on the first page of Google for keyword skateboard or long board. Small business owners to find specific keywords that will help facilitate a higher likelihood to be featured on the first page of Google. Adding locations in the content of your website is another way to help increase that likelihood.
If you’re building your website on WordPress, try installing the plug-in Yoast SEO. It’s a great resource that ranks your keyword usage and help to optimize your content for SEO ranking.
Another important factor for having great content is to optimize your tags. What are tags? Tags are broken down into the following:
Title Tag:
The title tag is the title of the web page that provides the reader with concise overview on what the web page is about. It’s extremely important because it allows for a better user experience, sharing content and SEO. The title that is used on the search engine results page (SERP) needs to be keyword specific. This is the first thing that users see when they search your website. In our skateboard shop example, we’d want to title our page to something along the lines of Vancouver’s Vancouver Skateboards & Accessories – Pete’s Skateboard Shop. Ensure that each page of your website is optimized for the keywords and content that you want to be ranked for.
Meta Tag/Description:
Meta tags are the snippets of text that follow the title tag on the SERP. It gives users a brief overview of the webpage by providing a short description on the SERP. This text doesn’t appear on the page’s content itself but instead lies in the pages code. In our example, we could use something like; Pete’s Skateboard shop offers Vancouver’s finest Skateboards, long boards, penny boards and board accessories at affordable prices.
Alt Tags:
An alt tag is the attribute within the image tag. It provides a short description of the image used on your webpage. Providing this description provides a clear text alternative of the image for screen reader users or if the image doesn’t end up appearing. This helps with SEO purposes because it provides another opportunity to add your keywords and help boost your way to the first page of Google.
Content is king. We’ve heard this expression several times and it’s no joke. Produce content that is share worthy, and will increase the exposure of your website.
Optimizing your Website’s Performance
Speed of a website is extremely important. If building your website on WordPress, try to use a website that doesn’t take too long to load, or else it will take Google longer to crawl your website, hindering your rank potential in the search engine.
Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights website to check the speed of your website:
Building Authority by Linking & Guest Blogging
This is the power of your website or presence on the web. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon have the best authority because it is trusted and used frequently. People reference these sites and they are seen as go-to sites in their respective fields. For a small business, authority can be increased by linking to your website from other sites and social networks. It’s important to be proactive in your community by guest blogging, and providing links to your website on your very own social channels. The more links that point back to your website, the higher authority it will generate and optimize it’s presence on the web. It’s a great practice to allow others to guest blog on your website as well, as you’re increasing exposure to your webpage to a larger audience.
Creating a Friendly User Experience for Google Bots
The UX of the website is important. It allows Google to crawl websites more efficiently. This can go hand in hand with the performance of the website. This can also be generated from the code of the website, ensure that your hire an experience web developer to ensure that clean code is used to optimize your webs user experience as well as speed.
As mentioned earlier in the blog post, SEO is a continual process. As a digital marketer, my goal is to help my readers better understand the principles of SEO. There is no one miracle solution to SEO but it requires on-going work to achieve and maintain good ranking in Google.