SEO Basics – How to Rank Your Website Online
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a very important part of every website. SEO allows your website to appear higher in Google, Bing and other search results. With proper optimization your website can stand out from the massive amount of other competitive websites.
Search Engine Optimization is the practice of working with Google to communicate that your website is a trustworthy place to answer questions, and help searchers. Google is a business just like any other, they want to send their customers to the best possible websites to make sure that they continue to use their platform. This is why Google and other search engines care about SEO so much. It is a way to measure the trustworthiness, helpfulness, and safety of different websites they might send their customers to.
Luckily for us, there are many things that we can do to communicate that our website is a great place to send traffic. There are thousands of things that can be done to improve SEO, but in this blog, we will cover the most important ones that will make the biggest difference in your ranking.
1) SEO Friendly Content
Written content is a very important part of SEO. It helps to inform Google what your website is about and who should be seeing your information. For example: If someone searched for a simple question like “How to make a website?” Google is much more likely to show a website that has 100 blogs written on websites rather than one that only has 2. This is where blogging comes into play. It is one of the best ways to regularly populate your website with content so that Google is more likely to send you traffic.
2) Mobile Friendliness
It is more important than ever before that your website works well on mobile devices. Every day more and more people search the web on phones rather than traditional laptops or desktops. If your website does not load correctly on a phone then you could be scaring away more than half of your audience and this will greatly affect your search placement. Learn how to tell if your website is optimized for mobile devices here.
3) How Site Speed Affects SEO
The last thing that anyone wants to see is a slow loading website. Google knows that this and so they give priority to websites that have faster load times. As a general rule try to make sure that your website is loading in less than 5 seconds. This way you can avoid slow loading website penalties from Google. Learn more about speeding up your website here.
4) Domain Authority
Domain authority is a very broad idea, but it essentially summarizes how trustworthy your website is. As with SEO, there are many factors that influence this score, but the major components are quality content, social signals, number of links, and the quality of links to your site. Having authoritative links point back to your website is one of the best ways to raise domain authority and improve your ranking.
5) Images and SEO
Google has a hard time understanding images. It is difficult for the algorithm to pick up what is visually happening. That is why it is important to make it easy for Google to understand what an image is about by adding in alt tags, image titles, and meta descriptions. These extra bits of information help to inform google, as well as people who have visual impairments, what is happening in the image.
6) Website Security
If your website is not secure then it will send many red flags to Google signaling that it is an unsafe place to be. This will oftentimes result in being moved much lower in search rankings as well as a warning when users enter your website that they are in an unsafe zone. It is important that you secure your website and remove any malware that could be harming your search results. Use this guide to find if your website has any security issues.
7) Bread Crumbs
Bread crumbs are a great way to connect the pages of your website. Connected pages make it easier for users to navigate your website, but they also make it easier for Google to crawl and understand your website. The better that you website can be understood the more that Google will trust it and send traffic your way.
Conclusion
SEO can seem like a very intimidating idea but when it is broken down into many small tasks it becomes much more manageable. It is important to take the time to properly optimize all aspects of your website or else it will most likely never be seen. No matter how pretty a website is the SEO is the backbone that allows it to be found and have importance above all of the other websites out there. Take your time optimizing, and if you have any questions or need any assistance don’t hesitate to contact us here.