Just like other aspects of digital marketing, search engine optimization or SEO is one of the effective ways of increasing your website traffic and brand awareness. Right now, many companies across the globe are using SEO as part of their marketing strategies. That’s probably because of its ability to get more visitors on their respective sites and convert them into customers.
However, there are many factors to keep in mind when implementing SEO, and these include the fundamental principles that have remained unchanged through the years and are backed by some of the SEO experts you can find online.
If you’re planning to use SEO for your business, here are the six best practices from experts that you should consider from the get-go:
1. Prioritize Actual Users Over Search Engines When Writing Content
Writing content to manipulate search engines is one of the oldest methods of SEO. If you’re still applying this strategy to your SEO efforts, then, it’s time to change that mindset and start creating content for users first, and second for search engines.
This means that you should write content for people who can read your work and purchase your products later on. Make search engines your second priority when writing content since these are incapable of buying your products and becoming loyal customers.
Also, when you prioritize users, you’re able to create content that can help them. When this happens, many users will follow your content, and, as a result, search engines will reward your website.
2. Remove Anything That Causes Your Site To Slow Down
Aside from useful content, page speed is an essential factor in search engine optimization. When your website has a slow loading speed, visitors will abandon it and never come back. Besides, waiting for the page to load can be a frustrating experience for anyone who’s visiting your site.
If you don’t want to discourage people from purchasing your products, make an effort to remove all elements that could be slowing down your website. These can be due to unoptimized images, JavaScript issues, excessive ads, and bad hosting, among many others.
So, to ensure that your website comes with fast loading speed and, more importantly, is search engine optimized, you can take advantage of the best SEO tools available in the market. These tools, for instance, provide advanced solutions to help you achieve high search engine rankings for your website.
3. Utilize The Right Keywords In Your Images
For most SEO experts, having images is also crucial in every search engine optimization strategy because search engines, like Google, devote a section of its results to images. Due to this, it’s important to focus on using the right keywords for image optimization.
Typically, users type a couple of keywords when searching for an image, which is why you should get the most out of the keywords. Make sure all the image names and the accompanying texts are relevant to the images you incorporate into your website. In doing so, you can help your website obtain better rankings in the search engines.
4. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Given the advent of modern innovations these days, there’s no question why search engine giant, Google, has updated their search algorithm in a way that it boosts rankings of websites that are mobile responsive. One of the reasons for this is the increasing number of users who complete their buying transactions using their mobile devices.
That said, optimize your web pages by making them mobile-friendly. This means re-aligning some content in a way that it’s easy to read and scroll through a small screen. Remember, having a mobile-friendly website can help you generate more web traffic and increase search engine rankings over time.
5. Link Out To Relevant Content Pages
Many people believe that linking out to other websites with relevant content can hurt your search engine rankings because it keeps people off of your web pages. However, most SEO experts think otherwise.
Link building is one of the vital SEO practices being used nowadays. It has been a fundamental aspect of a reliable search engine optimization strategy because the more backlinks you get, the more chances of your site ranking higher.
Typically, the process of link building is simple. When you have more links coming into your website, it means that more users have found value in the products or services that you’re offering. This is one of the reasons why Google acknowledges the link factor as one of the ways to increase search engine rankings and enjoy better web traffic.
On the other hand, you should also understand that Google has started to become stricter with how businesses and SEO specialists do link building. Even if you have lots of relevant content, but people don’t link to your site, Google will not rank you as valuable. So, be sure your links are useful and are added on websites that are reliable to reap the benefits of link building.
6. Use Social Media Signals To Impact Search Engine Rankings
With the rise of many social networking platforms nowadays, social media has been a fundamental part of SEO strategy, so you have to pay attention to utilizing it. While Google hasn’t recognized these online channels as one of their ranking factors, many SEO experts believe that being active on social media can influence your website’s search engine rankings. The more you receive likes, shares, tweets, and pins, the more you make your website and content popular online.
Therefore, if you want to use more social media signals for your website, don’t hesitate to make useful content that’s worthy of being shared on different social media portals. Moreover, add more share buttons to your posts and encourage other users to share, like, and comment about your content. By doing these, you can establish momentum with social media signals and use them to gain better rankings.
Final Thoughts
By following the best SEO practices from the experts, you can make the most out of your digital marketing strategy for the benefit of your business. Although these techniques might not be easy to implement, they’re definitely useful in gaining more web traffic and improving search engine rankings. And, when these two instances happen, you’re able to acquire more leads and grow your revenue.
Dan Walden
Dan Walden is an entrepreneur who regularly publishes business-related articles on his blogs. Most of Dan’s articles aim to help small-scale entrepreneurs expand their business by adapting new innovative tools.