Websites are essential to business nowadays! That is why we must learn how to stand out from the millions of other pages. The way to do that is to have your website SEO done correctly. SEO can be very complex and sometimes hard to fully understand.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search engine optimization. Search engines, like Google, have a particular way of choosing who gets to be on the top of the search results and who shows up on page 1000 of the search results. Being able to fully understand this process can be the difference between our business growing or plateauing.
But how can I start ranking higher on Google?
Here are a few SEO quick tips to keep in mind:
- Improve the overall design of your website.
A well-designed website will always score higher on SERP (search engine results pages). In particular, web developers should pay special attention to the appearance and behaviour of buttons, links, images and forms. They should be placed where people can see them. Another thing we must keep in mind is to always pay attention to the user experience. This means, how much time are users staying on your page? Are they clicking links or are they leaving a few minutes after they arrive? All of these are questions that Search engines make when deciding to rank your page. By having a good website design you ensure a good user experience, therefore, ranking higher in the search results.
- Make sure that your website has good content.
It’s not just the design that’s important, content is fundamental as well and is not just words. It’s how the words are presented and organized on your site. Images and videos can help visitors understand your web pages, but they’re worthless if the content on them doesn’t match the rest of the site. Make sure that your keywords and key phrases are present in all of your content, and check to make sure that all links are working properly.
- Make sure that you use a keyword-optimized title tag.
In other words, make sure that every sentence in your title has a keyword. Keep in mind that your title will be displayed on the SERP (search engine results page), and it is the first thing that the search engine spiders will see. Therefore, if you want to rank highly for a particular keyword, the title tag is critical.
- Learn to use Links to improve SEO.
There are two big ways Search engines use links.
- To help determine how well a page should rank in its results
- To discover new pages, that they can use in their search results.
Once search engines have crawled pages on the web, they can extract the content of those pages and add it to their indexes. This way, they decide if they feel a page is of enough quality to be ranked well for relevant keywords. When they’re deciding this, the search engines don’t just look at the content of the page, they also look at the amount of links to that page from other websites, and also the quality of those websites. Generally speaking, the more high-quality websites that link to you, the more likely you are to rank well in search results. Here’s a quick video from Google that explains this process a bit.
- URLs are important for SEO
Time and time again we see websites with good content but a long and unintelligible URL. This isn’t as big of an issue as let’s say not getting your keywords right, but having a short and sweet URL that has your keywords in it can help Search engines realize what your page is about and rank it higher for specific search results. Not to mention, having a friendly easy to read URL can when it comes to having other sites link to your page.
These are just some of the fundamental things you can do to improve your website’s SEO ranking. But let’s dive a little deeper into what things we must avoid doing.
Here’s a little list of common mistakes we see in SEO.
- Not having a mobile-friendly page
SEO is not only about content it’s about website quality.
Nowadays having a mobile-friendly user experience is ESSENTIAL, especially if you have any type of online store. An incredible 72.9 percent of shopping online is done through mobile devices.
- Keyword and link stuffing
We are referring to using too many keywords and links thinking that the more we have the better it is. This can be true to an extent but when the overflow of keywords and links starts to hinder the user experience, that’s when Search engines start to mark you as low-quality websites and will start ranking you lower.
- Using old SEO tactics
SEO has gone through a variety of changes throughout the years. Many of the things that worked back in the day will not work and will even lower your chances to rank on SERP. This includes for example:
Using tiny fonts to hide and repeat keywords.
Spamming keywords and links.
Using the same colour text and background to sneakily write as many relevant words as you can.
Having Comment spam on your website to fake traffic.
These things simply do not work anymore and Search engines pick up on these things and will choose to not show your page and can even blacklist your website.
- Not using or misusing tools.
Tools are fundamental to grow your website, without these we wouldn’t be able to monitor the performance of our website and tweak accordingly. That being said there are hundreds of tools to choose from but here are the essential ones you should consider using to improve your website’s SEO:
- A traffic analysis tool (example Google Analyticsmost commonly used)
- Good analysis tool for backlinks (example LinkMiner)
- Keyword research tool (example KWFinder or SemRush)
- Good rank tracker (example SERPWatcher)
- Website performance analytics tools (example GTMetrix)
These tools are used for different things but are all useful for tracking progress and making changes.
- SEO is not an overnight process.
Every SEO process takes time. Ranking a new page on Google can take anywhere from 5-8 months to see its full potential even if you are doing everything “right” from the beginning.
This can be discouraging if you are not aware of this when starting. But don’t give up and keep following these tips to achieve a higher ranking page on Google.
Avoiding these most common mistakes and following our SEO quick tips, should put you on track to rank higher on google and improve your overall SEO journey.
All In all, learning SEO is fundamental for anyone that has a business. And with these SEO quick tips, you will be on the right track to achieving your business goals. That being said it is a very time-consuming job that’s why some businesses choose to outsource and improve their website’s SEO.
This is a very commonly used strategy simply because by outsourcing the nitty-gritty details of creating an SEO-optimized website, business owners can focus on creating the best quality content and that way making sure the user experience flows nicely and in turn increasing your SERP ranking even higher.
If you are feeling stressed or simply want to have your page rank higher without having to dedicate hours to research and modifications, consider using DoneMaker.
We can help you with:
- Setting up on-page SEO
- Generating comprehensive SEO report
- SEO Keyword & Suggestions
- SEO Keyword Rank Tracking
Click here to check out all of the tasks we offer or click here to get a free task done today.
Last thoughts:
SEO is changing every day and we must make sure to keep on top of all of these changes. Google is very good with providing enough information on updates so that we can follow along and start ranking higher on google.
Remember that in this case, faster is better, the quicker your page is, the better. If you can provide the user with a pleasant and useful experience while on your website, this will ensure that you will improve your SEO.
Also, have patience, you can’t make drastic changes and expect them to work overnight. Search engines take time to rank you as best as they can and the better you do throughout these 5-8 months, the higher you will rank at the end of it.
