With nearly 1 billion websites online and a limited human attention span, getting anyone to look at your website can be a formidable task. Over the past decade and a half, search engines have helped solve some of the problem, but the challenge of being discovered by customers or a random web surfer is still fairly difficult. You can certainly pay for an ad to be placed at the top of a search result, or use social media to get your name out there, but both can also be very tedious. One of the suggestions that many marketing professionals make is to employ search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to get noticed by search engines.
Getting your site SEO-ready involves a great deal of work but is very doable. In today’s blog post, we’ll showcase five different ways you can employ SEO on your website to help improve your search result ranking.
1. Publish Relevant Content
Quality content is the top driver for search engine discovery. When writing for your website it’s always important to write to the reader, not to the search engine that will discover you. When writing, identify a keyword for your content and repeat this phrase strategically throughout the piece of content. Additionally, use bold, italics, heading tags, and other forms of emphasis to highlight keyword phrases, but don’t overdo it; search engines will punish you. Best practice for keyword density is 3%.
2. Update Your Content Regularly
Regularly updated content is one of the best indicators of site relevancy. Therefore, it’s important to update your site content regularly and search engines will recognize this by letting users know. If you need advice on how to update regularly, check out our advice on content calendars.
3. Manage Your Metadata
When you are designing your webpage you will notice that between the <head> tags there is space to insert metadata. There are three types of metadata that you can add for your website:
- Title Metadata: Title metadata is responsible for page titles displayed at the top of a browser window.
- Description Metadata: Description metadata is the text description that a browser will use in a page search return. This is a description which will appeal to your audience, and convince them to come visit your website.
- Keyword Metadata: Finally there’s Keyword Metadata, which are phrases that people type when they want to find your website. It’s important to use a variety of phrases that you think visitors may use to find your page and to keep your phrases to three words or less. Do note that using too many phrases may result in your website getting penalized.
4. Be Original
Duplication of content is often looked down upon by search engines. Therefore it’s important that you don’t create content that can be viewed at another URL. Republishing content from other websites, for example, is not just copyright infringement but can also ruin site rankings.
You can check if your site has any duplicate content by going to websites like CopyScape,SiteLiner, and Screaming Frog which can help identify and remove duplicate content.
5. Be Mobile
With Google’s upcoming announced changes, it’s important that your website is mobile-friendly (we covered this last month). With so many people using mobile devices to access the Internet, having a mobile-friendly website means that users will stay longer and interact with your content. Plus, if you don’t adhere to the new changes, your website may fall down in search rankings.
Finally, myhosting.com also offers search engine tools for website owners who may want to increase their search rankings. From our HTML Toolbox which repairs any HTML errors to our Search Engine Power Pack, we can help you achieve top ranking in all the major search engines so you can get more traffic and a larger audience. Check those out here.
Do you have any of your own SEO tips? Share them with us in the comments below and let us know how they have helped boost your website.
