Search engines, particularly Google, should have an affinity for your website or it will languish somewhere at the bottom of the 100th page in search results. To be visible to potential visitors, your site must rank high on search engines. The process of Search Engine Optimization is slow and manually intensive and hence you need to put your best foot forward as soon as the site is ready. Here’s a roundup of essential SEO tips to help your site achieve higher ranking and gain strategic advantage over rivals in the long term.
- One Keyword Theme for One Page
The structure of your website has an impact on its SEO ranking. You should categorize each page in such a way that it targets a set of relevant and related keywords. The approach has two apparent benefits. Each page on the site has a unique theme and target keywords.
Also, you may further target secondary keywords by creating more sub-categories and sub-pages for each category. Thus, instead of stuffing one or two pages with dozens of target keywords, you are stitching together pages with clearly defined themes and their own set of keywords, a practice that gets your site into SEO good books.
Remember, an attempt to optimize one page for too many keywords isn’t a wise idea.
- Offer Unique, Google-friendly Content
After Google’s recent search engine updates, on-page content has a massive affect on a site’s SEO ranking. Make sure you offer unique, relevant, valuable, insightful and engaging content to the visitors. Data shows that the websites offering exclusive, long-form content, typically with a word count more than 2,000, have an SEO edge over the ones with short and shallow content.
The basic rule here is – present the content as a solution to someone’s problem. Don’t try to befool the search engines by splattering the keywords unnaturally and unnecessarily or you site may end up lost in the sea of web. Go for strategic placement of keywords in HI and H2 tags of your page. Long tail keywords can find place in H3 and H4 subheadings.
Remember, write content for humans and not search engines. Value for the users will earn your higher ranking.
- Create Accurate Page Titles
A title tag, placed in the <head> tag of HTML document of web page, tells the search engines and the users what the page is about. Choose a title that accurately describes the page content and pick unique titles for each page to communicate to the search engines how one page is distinct from the other.
Try to be informative in the titles but keep it short, as too wordy descriptions are unhelpful to the users and hence lose their SEO value.
- Add Brief, Informative Meta Descriptions
Meta description is the snippet that appears just below your website name and URL in Google search results. Keep this information brief but action-focused to encourage the users to click on the link and visit your page. Although, the SEO ranking of your website doesn’t directly depend on meta description, a good window to your site boosts the click through rate.
- Install Google Analytics & Add Your Website To Google’s Search Console
How do visitors use your website? What keyword phrases they are using? Which keywords in your site are bringing traffic? There are many other questions that can be answered by setting up Google analytics free tracking software.
With Google Analytics, you can spot new keyword phrases and optimize your site accordingly. You can visit Google.com/Analytics and sign up using your Google account.
Once you have installed Google Analytics, you may add your website to Google’s Search Console, a platform that provides webmasters with crucial metrics. You can visit Google.com/Webmasters to add your website to Google Search Console.
These two steps will not deliver any instant SEO results but lay a strong foundation to build search strategy.
- Get Quality Back-links
When quality websites link to your site, it contributes to your SEO juice. Link-building is a gradual process but if done correctly, brings your site in Google’s radar and improves visibility for certain keywords.
Remember, quality and not the quantity should drive your link-building efforts. Submit your published content to quality websites, the one with high page rank. Maintain distance from link farms, which are dozens of directories hosted in a single IP.
Google’s Penguin, Panda and Hummingbird updates since 2012 jolted the sites with spam back-links. So, never to leapfrog with a malpractice that could backfire in future.
I am sure the above mentioned tips will be an SEO launchpad if you are getting your site up and running. These are basic but essential SEO steps too dear to miss in the beginning. Before you approach any SEO Services Company in India, you can get this done at your own end.
