For content marketers, the quality of their content is paramount to success. But it’s just as important that their marketing efforts be effective, otherwise, no one will even get the chance to read it!
Here is where SEO is essential for making your site findable.
Simply put, Google rankings are the keys that will help you reach a wider audience. Employing the right SEO methods is essential to getting the “spiders” interested in your site. Google uses spiders to crawl through websites, looking for fresh content, inbound links, and traffic data. Spiders crawl around the Web to see different indicators like domain age or backlinks to determine if your site is worth ranking. If your site satisfies the search engine ranking factors, congratulations, you’re likely going to go up the rankings; if not, it’s probable that your site will live in obscurity.
The world of search engine optimization is always changing and can be hard to keep up with. However, there are some basic fundamentals that all good SEO practices abide by. If you focus on following these age-old guidelines, then you will surely succeed in this game.
1. Be Original
Google wants to make sure that the user finds what they’re looking for. This means the most important principle of SEO is making sure Google knows your site offers a lot of useful and relevant information. By providing unique, trustworthy content, Google will see you as an authoritative source and rank your page higher.
Content is not limited to just articles and words. They also include:
- Pictures — As humans, we are visual. By posting visually appealing photographs, you can encourage people to come back and check out your site.
- Videos — Videos are a great way to help your visitors understand your product / how to use it. They can also create a valuable educational resource that is shared among many visitors and on social media, meaning you’ll receive more new traffic.
- Plugins and Tools — Google wants you to put the effort in, and one way of doing this is by installing a useful plug-in into your website. Doing this has the potential to help rank you higher on Google search pages.
2. Work the Social Media Platforms
Social media is rapidly gaining traction and can be very useful in attracting traffic to your website. Google now considers social media popularity when determining a site’s authority.
Here are some ways to make your readers share your content on social media:
- Reciprocate — It’s common for influencers to help each other out in the digital age. Promoting, tweeting, or sharing their content is really a way of thanking them for promoting ours and we would want to do the same.
- Provide Value-On-Top-Of-Value — Reader engagement is huge. When readers see additional, exclusive content on social media sites that they can’t find elsewhere, then they’re way more likely to come back. And obviously, the more time that readers spend with your brand, the better it is for everyone.
- Discover Who the Major Players Are — By identifying and casually getting to know Twitter’s power players, you’ll be able to form a mutually beneficial relationship just by retweeting and tweeting their content.
3. Own Your Property
If you want your website to be a genuine business, owning the property is important. If you want your content to be seen by Google, it makes sense to purchase your own hosting and domain. Purchasing a domain and hosting for your website shows professionalism on the part of Google and makes you seem more credible. So make the investment, it will help your SEO and will lead to a high ranking.
4. SEO Your Theme
To ensure an enjoyable experience for your visitors, and to ensure that Google trusts you, it’s important that your website theme is optimized and showcases who you are. By doing so, Google will be able to discover your content. When it comes to SEO, some good methods are:
- Make Sure There Are No Broken Links — Make sure each link is working and intact; links that lead to pages with 404 errors will just annoy visitors.
- Be Intuitive — A good theme will both look nice and be easy to use. It shouldn’t frustrate visitors and make their experience on your site unnecessarily difficult.
- (Slow) Speed Kills — Today, an average person will leave your site if it doesn’t load in 2 seconds flat. Make sure to keep your site running at standard speed and both you and Google will be thanked.
5. Optimize Permalinks
People don’t just come down from the sky to your website from thin air. They come from permalinks like those containing a root and extension.
Enhancing your permalinks with relevant words may be a great way to drastically improve both the ranking and engagement of your website.
When you make changes to your site’s permalinks, you want to modify new links only. Otherwise, old links will break.
6. Build Backlinks
Backlinks are a highly effective strategy to help increase the visibility of your site in organic search. Just remember, the best way to develop a sizable bank of impressive backlinks is to provide superior original content for your site, use it to gain the respect of your peers, and then parlaying that respect into invites for guest posting on top sites.
7. Be Smart With Your Keywords
If you play fast and loose with your keywords you will most likely not be able to reap all the SEO benefits. It’s important to spend some time researching and figuring out what words are best because they can make or break your content. It’s advised that you look into key variations, SEO, and content marketing so you can figure out where to put your time.
Conclusion
You need to get your ranking just right in order to not be at the bottom of the pile, as this would make your site hard to find. This can be tricky but following these tips will mean you have a strong foundation for promoting it online. From that point onwards, it’s up to you. You can just keep focusing on the fundamentals, or you can explore some of the buzzword techniques (SEO) and other out-of-the-box methods that might help your website get better rankings.
