You may already be aware of what SEO is and how important it is for any kind of website striving to make money through the internet. If you are a business that uses a website to offer services or products, SEO is more than necessary for you. But how do you know what are search engines looking for when they test your website? We’re going to cover exactly that in this post.
Search engines love relevancy
The first thing you need to make sure is that your site is relevant to the keywords you are using. For example, if you’re selling shoes, your website needs to be about shoes. It can’t have a page with shoes and a keyword like accessories or bags. Search engines want people to come to a page when they search for a key phrase and actually find what they were looking for.
Quality of Content Matters… A Lot!
Quality of content doesn’t mean good text or a convincing story. What search engines are looking for is a page that offers unique, well-researched content in the form of text, images and other small graphics that send out a clear and concise message to the people visiting. Using useful information architecture to make your content interactive, such as sorting, filters, jump links, collapsible/expandable content regions, and other front-end javascript interactivity helps indicate to Google that your content will be engaging and useful to searchers. One of my favorite tools to use for Content Optimization is LinkGraph’s Content Optimizer, which helps guide content improvement by scoring your landing pages and identifying topics that the content needs to explore thoughtfully in order to be relevant for the primary keywords you are targeting. Using a tool like this to make sure your landing pages have the right content as well as heading tags to rank for the keywords your targeting is a great way to streamline your workflow.
The user experience
Another thing that is very important to search engines is the end-user interaction your website provides. If users hit the dreaded “back” button and pogo-stick on your search results, search engines learn that your search result didn’t provide content to satisfy the user’s search intent. If your website doesn’t have a modern, easy-to-use user interface, has a lot of ad-units, or takes more than 3 seconds to load, you’re likely going to have weak user-experience signals. Improving on those issues will help your site perform better in search results.
The speed of your website
Site performance and load speed is critical – search engines will rank your site higher if they open and load fast (under 3 seconds). A user is typically willing to wait for about 4-5 seconds for a page to load before hitting the back button and looking for another search result. If the page doesn’t load within this window of time, not only visitors will leave your page but the search engines will also drop its ranking. To increase speed of your website, use a good server, CDN, compress your static assets (CSS, JS, and images) and cache any non-dynamic pages. Google Pagespeed Insights is a great tool to use to profile the performance of your website and identify issues that may be holding your site back from performing better in serach.
Mobile friendly
The most important part of any website these days is its cross-compatibility. If your website doesn’t open properly on one of the platform from mobile to desktop, it will never be able to rank.
Search engine marketing is one of the many methods of internet marketing that exist. When done properly, it can lead to a geyser of traffic coming to your website.