Looking for ways to drive more traffic and prospective customers to your website? Outlined below are some fundamental steps to consider for boosting your search-engine-presence. Even renowned companies doing large business online struggle to get noticed by search engines like Bing and Google. The internet, after all, is home to approximately 120 million domains and billions of indexed pages. However, every business, huge or small, can easily draw traffic by using SEO (Search Engine Optimization), for short.
Website traffic is directly related to the ranking of your site on Google and Bing search results. The higher you manage to rank your website, the more visitors you get. The exact formula or algorithm used by search engines to rank websites is an unrevealed secret, but the basic elements are widely known. Search engine optimization entails tailoring your site to comply with the ranking criteria as much as possible.
Remember! Search engine optimization isn’t magic. It would probably be unable to land your website among the top ten sites for extremely popular search terms. Also, it cannot drive traffic regularly to a website that does not contain anything of value. However, you can boost your ranking considerably and even manage to land on the first page among top ten website if you make use of keywords that actually matter.
Do I need to consult a professional for SEO services? It entirely depends on you. If you have time to spend an hour per page, there is no need to inflict extra financial burden on yourself.
The nitty-gritty Of SEO
1. Choosing Keywords
The fundamentals of keyword optimizations are pretty simple: Find out the search words that are being used by potential customers in order to find services or products similar to yours, and build your website content around those keywords. The only thing that complicated the matter is that a great number of other websites are also trying to do the exact same thing.
Understanding the competitive ration is the key. On the whole, the more common, or potentially lucrative a search term is, the more websites struggle to rank higher for that term. You most definitely want to rank higher on popular terms, but if you do not have infinite resources, it is advisable to target keywords for which you have a better chance to rank high. Go for the terms and phrases that are continuously searched but are usually overlooked by your competitors.
Calculating the ratio of the total number of web pages a search yields to the popularity of search word/phrase is an effective way to find keywords that are overlooked. However, don’t forget to look for only those terms that are relevant to your products and services.
Next, find out how often the term is searched by the users. You can use a keyword-tacking tool for this purpose. There are a few tools that not only show how many times a keyword is searched, but also suggest other relevant phrases and terms.
Run each term/phrase through Google and Bing. If there is a high number of website returned by both the search engines, the competition is substantially high. In the end, divide the total number of indexed pages by total number of daily searches. If the result is lower, the term is promising. The ratio must be 500 to 1 or lower. Narrow your keyword terms and phrases.
2. Placing Keywords tactically
Once you determine the finest keywords/phrases to use, it is time to employ them tactically in 2 places.
The code:
It is the search engine, such as Bing, or Google that eventually associates a key-phrase with a webpage. The top of the webpage’s coding is the very first place a search engine looks to decipher a webpage. You need to incorporate the key-terms or key-phrases in the title, keyword tags and description.
These are normally knows as Meta tags, and the code normally starts with that word. The title always appears at the top of the browser window of the user, and search engines usually quote the description. Therefore, try to make them concise and coherent. The description must be 12-24 words long and title 6-12 words long. The objective of title and description is to reinforce the visible content at your website.
The visible content:
The keywords need to appear regularly in the content and other page elements, such as headlines, subheads and the tags that underline images. Also, there is no hard and fast rule for the amount of text per page, but if it is worth reading, Google and Bing would love it. Never try to stuff your web-pages with keywords unnaturally.
3. Creating a Better Website
The way your website is designed, organized and built affects your ranking on both Google and Bing. Try lining up your web content according to how people search in order to define to the search engines what your website is about. Grouping similar web-pages together into different subfolders and directories and creating virtual silos by employing links to guide visitors from one webpage to another is highly recommended.
There are countless other technical strategies that can help, but you will need to consult a professional web developer for this purpose. Also, host your website on a reasonably fast server. Make sure that your page code is free of bugs and comply with the principles for web structure set by WWW (World Wide Web) Consortium. Don’t forget to add a sitemap to your website, since it makes it easier for the visitors to scan the website. You can directly submit the sitemap of your website to Google and Bing.
4. Seeding links
Once you optimize your website properly, it is time to attract links from other similar websites. Most SEO consultants present you a pretty prosaic strategy: Create an excellent website with useful content that can attract user from other sites and to which other websites will want to refer their readers.
Avoid keyword stuffing, spamming, hidden links and cloaking!