When it comes to marketing, SEO is one of the most significant and fundamental aspects of improving the visibility of a website in search engines. If you have a website that doesn’t feature on the first page of the search engines for the keywords you wish to rank for, then there’s something you are not doing right. This article was written to help you solve that problem.
So Let’s Begin With The First SEO Tip.
1. Pick the Right Keywords
When your website is focused on a specific topic, it makes it much easier to choose keywords for it. So, what are keywords? Essentially, they are the words that an end-user will type into the search engine, which should hopefully lead them to your website. When it comes to choosing the right keywords, there are several ways you can do it. The best way is to do research and find one that relates to the content of your pages. Once you have that keyword, you want to ensure it’s included in the URL of the post, the Meta description, header tags, and alt tags. If you’re using WordPress to run your site, then there are SEO plugins that you can acquire, which will aid you in this process.
The keyword you select should be optimized on the page so that, when people search for it, your content appears in the search engine rankings. If your website is about bike riding, then “bikes” and “riding” should be included in many of your keywords. One thing to keep in mind is that short-term keywords, that is, keywords that consist of two or fewer words, typically have the most competition. For this reason, you want to add additional words to your keywords to make them long-tail. This makes them more specific and eliminates some of the competition.
Using the example I described earlier, a long-tail keyword would look something like the following “best bikes for mountain riding”. This is a more specific keyword that better describes what the content on the page is talking about. One thing to note, however, is that long-tail keywords tend to receive less traffic, so you don’t want to use ones that are too obscure.
2. Think About Zero-Click Searches
Not necessarily a new addition to SEO, but one that has grown in popularity over the years is zero-click searches. Essentially, it’s when an end-user is able to find the answer to their query without having to click through to a website in the search engine listings. This is because the search engines take snippets of content from the various web pages of that particular keyword and display it in an organized fashion. Today, close to 50% of all searches results in a zero-click.
New features added to the search engines contribute quite significantly to these zero-click searches, but in truth, it’s more down to Google Answers, which is the way that the search engine answers queries submitted by the user. Answers like “how long do a dog live” can be answered directly from the SERPs.
As a new-age marketer, these are things you want to tap into.
You want to figure out ways that you can benefit from these zero-click queries, such as by optimizing your content to include brand awareness. You also want to optimize your content for keywords that have the highest click-through rate.
3. Google’s EAT Principles
Google, sometime in the past, confirmed that the quality of your content would become an essential factor in its rankings.
However, for many people, they ask, what exactly does quality mean?
To make things simple, Google introduced the EAT principles, where EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These are the principles that the search engine considers when determining the quality of a site’s content.
Google’s ultimate objective is to deliver the best possible results to the user.
One way Google was able to do this was through the introduction of the Panda algorithm. This update was designed to eliminate both duplicate and low-quality content from the search engine listings.
Another new feature they added was RankBrain. RankBrain is essentially an AI, which is designed to be able to interpret search queries, just as a human being would.
For example, if an end-user was to search for mountain bike racing, they may also get results for racer bikes on the very same search engine listings.
These algorithms and updates are designed to crawl only the best sites and add them to the listings. This way, the user receives the best possible results every time they look for something through Google.
4. Research The Competition
Once you have some idea of what keyword you want to target for your post(s), the next step should be to analyze the competition. To check the sites that are already ranking for that keyword. This is very simple to do, just type the keyword into the search engine, but try to be organic. Type it in a way you think the average individual would type it.
Once you have a list of websites, you want to save those URLs and use a website like Ahrefs to analyze them. This website, and many others like it, will tell you how many backlinks the page is receiving, including its location. You should also be able to find additional keywords that you may want to write content on and target in the search engines.
5. Create Quality Content
Quality content is a big factor in SEO. Whatever you decide to write about, you want that content to be detailed but also readable. Rather than write one highly detailed article about a single topic, you want to break everything down into sizeable chunks. Talking about smaller aspects of the overall topic, like an article about the handlebars of a bike and another article on the gears. More Read: https://www.compuchenna.co.uk
Search engines prefer websites that deliver new content on a consistent basis. One thing you do not want to do is copy your content from elsewhere. This is because your website will be penalized and demoted in the search engines. Instead, focus on writing the best quality content.
Additionally, you may want to think about updating your old content. This means adding additional content and changing or revising old articles. Whatever you can do to make the most of your website and its content, you should do it.