Do you want your website to be found by potential customers? Have you started optimizing your website? Search Engine Optimization, commonly called SEO is the best way to increase your search engine rankings so you can be found on the web. In this blog post we are going to focus on 10 things you can do to begin optimizing your website. These 10 things should make a big impact as your optimizing your website for search engine rankings.
Keyword Rich Content
- At Solo SEO we believe the most important thing to do when optimizing your website is to create keyword rich content. Content is considered any text that a search engine algorithm can read. When optimizing your website, you need to optimize the content itself with the keywords your potential customers are searching for. Make sure that the keywords you want to rank for on a specific page are included in the first 100 words of text. You will also want to feature secondary keywords within your body copy as well. However, you want to be careful not to overload your content with keywords, this is commonly called keyword stuffing and is considered a red flag to the search engine algorithms. Keyword stuffing can actually hurt your search engine ranking.
Content Length
- Content length matters for website optimization. Each page on your website if possib should contain at least 500 words. Keyword optimized website pages with 2,000 to 3,000 words currently seem to rank higher than pages with less content. You want the content to be focused so don’t sacrifice quality of content just to hit a magic word count number. Search engines take into account the quality as well as the quantity of content, and quality matters most. Think about the purpose of the page when writing it and how important it is that it ranks for non-brand terms of long-tail keyword searches. This will help you determine how much time and energy to spend on crafting your content for search engines.
Keyword Variety
- Make sure you vary your keywords when optimizing web content. Search engines assess keywords by where they appear and how they relate to each other. Search engines now looks at the relationship between the words rather than just the number of times they are used. In a nutshell, that means it looks at how those words fit into the overall content of your page. You can work with this easily by making sure your content is on topic and that you have one topic per page on your site.
Keyword Rich Titles
- Use keyword rich titles. You can search for keyword questions and see what type of things people are asking about specific keywords, then, you can start writing content to answer those questions.
URL Structure
- Optimize your URLS for SEO. Yes, this is still important. When you choose your URLs, use keywords that people are searching for. Make your page names relevant to the page content. The URL will add additional value to your keywords and it appears in the search results. A URL can have direct influence on whether people click on your link.
Site Architecture
- Ensure that your categories and site structure make sense. The placement of a page on your website has an impact on how relevant a search engine deems thinks the page is. You do this through your site structure, by placing content in categories which are relevant to the search term. Naming your categories and sub-categories by utilizing keywords will benefit those pages and the pages listed within them. It’s a great way to optimize your website.
Optimize Page Titles
- Optimize page titles. Your page title is the element on the page where it is most important to strike a balance between readability and SEO. Search engines only show about 68 characters in its search engine without truncating (cutting off) part of the title. For best title results, you should always go with shorter keyword-rich titles.
Page Headings
- Optimize page headings for SEO. Page headings are used for both style and SEO. They break up the content so it’s easier for people to glance over your content. Most people do not actually read everything on a webpage. They do, however, glean from your page headings what you are writing about to see if it is worth a more in depth read. Include keywords whenever possible in your page headings and make sure the page heading is relevant to the content.
Optimize Image
- Optimize images for SEO. Make the image name descriptive and unique. If you name your images properly, it helps your search engine ranking, makes it easier for you to find them to put into your content, and helps end users to find the images when searching for certain related keywords. Images also have a written description through the image title and alt tag. These elements provide information about the image. Make sure to use keywords that relate back to the article.
Outbound Links
- Outbound links matter. Choose your links carefully as they can affect both relevance and trust. If you link to on-topic sites from your content, that’s a good indication that the content is relevant to the terms in question. Linking out to low-quality or irrelevant sites can have a negative impact on search engine rankings.
Use these 10 ideas to start optimizing your website now. If you practice all 10 of these reasons, then you will be well on your way to good SEO. A well planned out SEO strategy will help you get the traffic you need to your site so your business can grow and prosper.
Source: SoloSEO