If you currently have a business website, but it’s not getting as much attention from netizens as you expected, perhaps it’s high time you tweak some of its “settings” so to speak, by having it fully optimized! Yes, I guess your website needs something like SEO, or search engine optimization, which is the umbrella term form all the techniques used to drive traffic to a website from the search engines. And with 60% of today’s consumers beginning their buying processes from search engines like Bing, Yahoo and Google, the right SEO technique could help to increase brand visibility and drive new sales. Here are a couple of things that beginners to the world of SEO should know, so that they’ll have a much better time navigating through it.
Amazing User Experiences Boost SEO
What boosts a website? Is it the colorful images that are placed into it? Or is it the interesting content that’s written on the site? Well, according to SEO Agency Brisbane professionals, it’s the amazing user experiences that boost search engine optimization!
Search engines like Google know that users or online folks are looking for more than just great information, because they are also looking to seamlessly get the information from websites. So, if you’ve entered a website, only to feel frustrated because it as taking years to load, would you have a pleasant user experience with it?
Thus, for websites to rank well on the search engines, they will need to have fast page speeds, mobile-friendly sites, low bounce rates, high click-through rates and longer dwell times. These factors reflect how likely visitors are to stay on a website, as opposed to being turned off by poor user experience. With these factors in mind, your SEO expert should focus on optimizing your website for all types of devices!
Link-Building Truly Builds Authority
When other trusted websites link back to your website, this tells the search engines that you’re a brand or a website that can be trusted. This explains why many SEO Agency Brisbane experts utilize link-building as a major search engine optimization strategy.
Link-building is referred to as the process of gathering or generating more backlinks from high-quality websites back to your own site. Once this happens, search engines like Google will see this as an effective endorsement from the trusted website, and will essentially tell online users to visit your website. The more high-quality backlinks your website gets, the higher will your trust rating get.
But, generating backlinks does not happen organically, or naturally (Especially if you’re operating a small business). In fact, many small and medium-sized entrepreneurs begin by doing guest posts on external websites, while others do email outreach, and some reach out to bloggers and other website owners to ask them to add a backlink on content that they’ve already written.
Keyword Placement is Key
Keywords are a major factor in SEO. In fact, SEO Agency Brisbane experts agree that the more places your target search terms appear, the more likely will your website make it to the top of the search engine results.
But, where can you insert keywords to effectively boost your website’s visibility? Again, according to the SEO veterans, before you publish your webpage, you need to add a page title and a meta description, which makes up the text that is actually shown from your website when it appears on the search results page. Adding keywords can quickly inform the search engines that your website is relevant to a specified search term.
If You Follow the Best Practices, Visual Content Can Enhance Your Site’s Rankings
If you’re planning to enhance your website with a bunch of related visual content, the SEO Agency Brisbane experts suggest that the best images to include are the ones that have high quality and are unique on its own (as compared to using generic stock images).
But, when placing visual content or images, you need to remember that the file sizes of your images must be under 500 KB, and must be between 1,500 to 2,500 pixels wide, because if they’re more than these numbers, they’ll slow down your site’s load times!
Good-quality Content Can Make a Website Rank Higher
When most folks search for information on search engines like Google, they obviously want to get the best answers or suggestions in as few clicks as possible. Because of this, the search engines put a greater premium on content.
So, regardless of whether you’re writing content for a blog, homepage or landing page, you need to make sure that you maximize the website’s readability by providing the best and the clearest information or content possible. But, creating good-quality content also means that you do no keyword stuffing, because this is considered as black hat (or illegal) SEO, which search engines like Google heavily penalize.
Keyword Research is Essential
Here’s another item that most SEO Agency Brisbane experts find crucial, as adding keywords throughout a website’s content helps find your targeted audience. However, don’t quickly dismiss or throw out a potential keyword just because it does not have the highest search volume.
In fact, keywords that have highly-specific phrases (or long-tail keywords) which contain at least 3 words may not actually generate as much search engine traffic. Thus, it would be better to use industry or product-specific keywords that directly relate to your target market.
SEO and Branding Go Hand in Hand
One thing that some brands and business owners make is failing to let their brand or company inform their SEO strategy. While branding may look like a completely separate strategy for promoting your business online, your message, visual identity, voice and other factors actually help the search engines determine what exactly your business does, and what search terms it is relevant for.
Thus, when branding is effectively paired with an SEO technique or strategy, e-commerce websites are more likely to get more eyes on their brand, and more people will be aware of their brand too!
