You have just started your very own online business—what’s next? If your company relies heavily on the internet to get customers, the first thing that you will need is to get more traffic into your website. A website with high traffic means that there are a lot of internet surfers visiting your site and as traffic goes, the more traffic you have, the more chances that the products or services that you have will get purchased. Search engine optimization or SEO uses different techniques such to ensure that your company’s webpage will rank in search engine results.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO has been in existence for a long time and has helped a lot of businesses to get a lot of traffic to their websites. However, the digital industry is dynamic. What was effective before in terms of SEO techniques may not be as effective today. To maintain your business’s strong digital presence, here are nine advanced SEO techniques to keep your web page ranking high.
Improve User Experience
Different search engines such as Google would like to show the best results to the queries of their users. If the user is satisfied with the websites that came out from their questions, then that user will surely use that search engine again. Search engines determine the overall experience of a user when they click on a webpage that showed up in the results. If your webpage takes too long to load, users may abandon your site and move on to the next website on the results list. It is, therefore, essential to check your webpage’s loading speed for it to rank high in search engine results.
Focus on Schema Instead of Keywords
Search engines are changing their algorithm so that they would give more useful results to user queries. The objective of search engines today is to analyze the intention of users and anticipate what search results would best suit the users’ needs. Because of this, search engines look for web pages that effectively use Schema SEO instead of just putting a lot of different keywords that do not make sense. Schema markup is a system that will make it easier for search engines to determine what the content of the website is all about.
Establish YouTube SEO
When you enter queries into search engines, you may find different YouTube videos among the top ten results of your question. Take advantage of how YouTube videos always appear among the top results by creating your own YouTube video containing information about your business, your products and services, and your branding. However, it is not enough to record a video and upload the video to YouTube.
Remember that YouTube is also a search engine, and according to Forbes, YouTube is the 2nd most popular search engine behind Google. Your YouTube Video should also undergo a search engine optimization process for it to rank high in YouTube results pages. Some techniques to rank your videos high is to make your video title SEO-friendly. You should also provide a transcript of your YouTube video so that both YouTube and Google can understand every word of your video. Embedding your video content into your text-based websites will also give your site a lot of opportunities to be noticed by both YouTube and Google users. You should follow the same SEO techniques to your YouTube videos as you would implement on your webpage or blog posts.
Update your website’s content
Your website should have new content uploaded regularly. Even if you are selling products and services, your website must also contain useful information that may help your customers concerning the products and services that you are offering. When your site always has new content, your website’s visitors will frequent your page in search of information.
Some webmasters will tell you that one of the best network marketing secrets is to use a lot of keywords that are most commonly used by people on their searches. Using a program such as WordTracker will let people know a keyword’s frequency of use. Several SEO marketers will tell you that using a keyword frequently within a website through the website’s articles is the right way of increasing your website’s rank concerning that specified keyword. For example, if your web-based business is into selling hardware items, then uploading articles that contain a lot of keywords relating to hardware items will increase your website’s rank.
On the other hand, some SEO marketers will suggest that it is not in the number of keywords in the articles that count but rather on the quality of the material itself concerning its content. They say that too much use of a keyword within an article will make the article sound dumb and poorly-constructed. They believe that people will want to read articles that are read-worthy and full of useful information about a specific niche that they are interested in. Your company website should develop customers that will want to go back to your site from time to time to see if there are new updates on your page.
Establish Voice Search Optimization
More and more people are taking advantage of the voice search features of their smart devices to search for websites. It would be best if you made your website searchable by voice so that your site will not be left out once voice searching reaches its peak. One way for your website to rank high through voice search results is to include questions and answers in your content.
Voice searchers do not use the same algorithms as text searchers. People who use voice searches usually as complete questions rather than phrases such as “What do ferrets eat?” as compared to “ferret food.” Your website contents need to have a lot of question phrases or long-tail keywords so that it will rank high in voice searchers’ results. Use schema SEO structured data on your webpage and build your content around that structured data. Search engines such as Google will most likely pick a webpage that already contains the question and the answer.
Build Links
Backlinks have been essential to the SEO world before, and they will still be relevant today. Google and other search engines always give priority in determining search ranking by looking at web pages that have a lot of links. However, it would help if you remembered that you should be careful in putting links to your webpage. Low-quality links on your webpage may harm your site, making it rank lower. On the other hand, having links to trusted websites with high-quality content and high domain authority will establish your website as effective and safe, therefore making you rank higher. Search engines equate quality backlinks to reliability.
Optimize the Technical Aspects of Your Website
Setting the SEO for content management aside, it is also essential to make sure that the technical aspects related to running your website are optimized. Search engines do not want to give their users web pages that have a lot of glitches. It would help if you got your technical search engine optimization for your webpage to rank higher in Google search results. You can avoid glitches on your webpage by switching to a more secure connection by using HTTPS rather than the old HTTP web protocol. Another way of optimizing your webpage is by allowing it to be accessed by mobile phones by enabling Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP. A mobile-friendly website will make it easier for users to access your website on whatever screens they are using.
Target Local SEO
If you have a brick-and-mortar store, you should also use SEO to target your local market. Most searches on Google are from people looking for local information, while 97 percent of searchers use Google to find local businesses. Optimize your search engine results by adding geo-centric keywords to your web content. For example if you are looking for an SEO agency in Sydney, you will have to use a geocentric keyword, also you will have to add local business schema and make sure that you are optimizing your page according to the location.
Develop a Strong Social Media Presence
Do not just rely on SEO to make your website gain a lot of traffic. It would help if you also considered developing a strong social media presence. Create a social media page for your business and actively engage your followers by answering their questions or regularly giving them feedback.
Take care of analytics
You should also monitor the performance of your website to see if all the things that you have done on your site are working effectively. You may use the different performance indicators to determine what else can be done to make your website generate high traffic so that your online business will become successful. A successful SEO audit of your website will help you understand where your site is currently at and what you need to do.
Use Keywords That Matter
Keyword placement in your content is still vital. You must incorporate long-tail keywords in your page title, your URL, meta descriptions, and sub-headers for search engines to determine its rank. However, the frequency of your keyword use is no longer critical. There is no longer a need for you to repeat a keyword more than four times in the body of your content. Keyword placement will always trump keyword density.
So remember, having a website to give your business an online presence is not enough. It would help if you used the above SEO techniques so that your webpage will rank high in search engine results leading to more traffic and eventually to more sales.