In line with our busy everyday life, online businesses are growing faster and massively. For the past 10 years, Internet users have preferred to shop, advertise, and communicate primarily online, which increases the value and need of quality website SEO optimization. You still don’t know what includes the process and how it works? If the answer is “yes” then this article is the one for you!
What is SEO optimization?
The word “SEO” is an abbreviation that stands for “search engine optimization.” This is a process that improves the ranking of a particular website in search engines such as Google. Said with few words – the better your SEO, the higher your ranking. For example, if you have a car sales site, after successful optimization it will appear on the front page of people searching for the word “car.” Of course, ranking on the first page is a difficult task, but not impossible. Continue reading and find out how to achieve it.
Tips for beginners
We have prepared some expert advice that will help everyone who has decided to do their own SEO optimization.
1. Keywords Selection
This is the first and most essential step in optimizing a website. You should be aware that search engines work with keywords and key phrases. By your personal experience, you know that when you are searching for something on the Internet you will never write a few sentences in the search tab, but only one, two or up to three words. That’s why it’s so important to select carefully the keywords associated with your website activity.
There are many different online tools that will help you with the proper keywords research. Some of them are Google Trends, Keywords Everywhere, and Google Adwords – Keyword Planner. With their help, you will easily find relevant words for your website and see how high is their monthly search on the Internet. It is important to choose words with high search rates, but keep in mind that more people are “fighting” to rank with them too.
The level of search preference depends on how well developed is your website. If it’s brand new, the better option is to focus on keywords in the “middle ground.” These are words that don’t have so high monthly search, and you can rank easily for them. If your site is already well developed and you have lost of content, you can jump into the high-level keyword race with no fear.
2. Uniqueness of the content
The second important step in the SEO optimization process is to create unique content for the website. It is not desirable to copy texts from other sources on the Internet, and we advise you to use your own images. Google “punishes” websites with plagiarized text content and sends them to the distant back pages that nobody visits. Gathered in a few words – create your own text, and everything will be fine. Of course, if writing is not one of your strong qualities you can always contact a copywriting agency, but the principle is the same.
You can also use different online tools to check the uniqueness of text content. One of the beast plagiarism checkers is Small SEO Tools. If the results after the check are higher than 90% uniqueness, the text is ready to be published.
Using an image that repeats on the web is not that fatal to your site, but the use of unique images (ordered by a designer or purchased from a website for image sell) is an advantage for your SEO. Of course, from ethically and legally point of view, it is not okay to use copyrighted images because the consequences of this may be serious. Fortunately, there are sites offering a wide range of free pictures without copyrights which will ease you in this situation. Some of them are Pexels, Pixabey and Unsplash.
3. Link building
Link Building is a process that builds outbound links to a website during which links from the chosen one are embedded into other sites. It looks simple at first, but you need to get to know the process before you take action. Link building is a network linking that will connect your site to others. It’s important to connect with sites with similar to your activity, so Google’s algorithms can easily put you in one group.
Similar with the real life, Google as a “strict parent” will understand if you “play with bad kids” and he won’t like it. It is very important to build links only with quality and authoritative sites because otherwise search engines will bind you with a low-authority group and your site will also become one of them. A single link from a quality website is much more valuable than hundreds of links coming from sites with low authority. Keep in mind that search engines put the quality of the entire network of sites under one denominator. That’s why it is important to research the other links on the potential website you want to connect to.
The link building process can be achieved with the use of articles, press releases, banners, presence on social networks, etc. The results of the quality work will boost your SEO and the traffic on your website.
4. Meta titles and descriptions
Last but not least are meta titles and meta descriptions. They are the main part of the HTML code and help search engines enrich their information about the chosen website. With their use, search engines can put the site in a relevant of the content group.
The meta title is very important for the SEO, so we recommend that it contain the main keywords associated with the page. Each page has a different meta title, which must include keywords related to the content on it. The meta description doesn’t affect site ranking, but this doesn’t mean it’s not important. They help the search engines to find out more about what’s on the page.
These were the first steps in SEO optimization. We hope that we’ve helped everyone who wanted to develop their personal site and rank better on the search engines.
