SEO is a tricky business full of traps and pitfalls. To make things easier we try to think in terms of best practices. In general all of the best practices focus on building a website which is responsive, easy to navigate and which contains lots of useful information which people will want to share.
With your goal being to indicate that your site is the most useful, and therefore the most worthy of the top spot, you should strive to create a fantastic online experience and do everything you can to draw attention to it.
In general the SEO best practices are broken into two areas: the things you do on the page and the things you do off the page. Under those two headings you find all the practices you have to be aware off if you want to perform well in the search. Let’s have a look at them now.
This is the files, content and systems that make up your website itself. Its here were you have the most influence because you can directly control what your site contains, how it behaves and how it performs. As we have stressed earlier the objective is to make the best site on the internet for your industry. The three areas to thing about are:
In the world of SEO content is king. Be sure that every section of text your site contains is the best it can be. You want it to be fresh, useful and engaging containing the words and terms you’re hoping to get found for. Don’t forget to do your keyword research before sitting down to write any content. You may find the words you think are best aren’t as good as you thought.
The code that is used to build your site is hugely important when it comes to SEO. Try to keep it as clean as possible and be sure that you have unique title tags, meta descriptions and headers and that they feature your target keywords. Don’t engage in any nefarious coding practices such as keyword stuffing or hiding content from the viewer.
This refers to the structure of your site and the machinery behind it. Ensure that your website is crawlable and that Googlebot can reach and read any page you would like indexed. Make sure your site doesn’t contain any duplicate content either from your own site or from elsewhere on the web. Next up is speed. Your site should load as fast as possible. Anything over 7 Seconds is way too slow. URL paths should be logically structured, static not dynamic and have names reflecting the content of the page. You should also make sure that your website can be viewed across all devices i.e. mobile, tablet and desktop as well as screens of all sizes.
These are the things going on elsewhere on the internet which have an impact on your rankings. Normally you can attempt to influence these things but can’t actually control them directly. The tactics you’ll use will aim to cultivate the kind of online attention you want and hopefully, if you can catch the public imagination, it’ll increase your position in the rankings.
One of the biggest influencers on how well your site will perform is the number and quality of the inbound links which point to your website. When someone links from their site to yours this acts as a sort of vote. They’re basically saying “Go to this website it’s awesome!” google takes note of this, considers whether the website linking has any authority then decides how much value the link is worth based on that.
So try to encourage links to your website from a wide range of sources focusing on those which are already authorities in your field.
Trust is exactly what it sounds like. Is your website a credible resource that people can rely on to be factual? This will be largely based on the type of sites that link to it but also things like the amount of time the website has existed for in its current form. Does the website take efforts to protect its users and prove it is who it says it is such as by having an SSL Certificate? All of these things will impact on your rankings
Social networks are the new big thing when it comes to SEO. Set up social networks for your business and use them to share and promote your content. If lots of people who are considered to be reputable opinion leaders share your website on their social networks this will have a positive impact on your SEO.
Information about your website including, where it is nationally and in terms of city and how it has historically performed as well as a number of other factors which you can’t influence directly.
All of these things will impact your rankings to some extent so as you see there’s no silver bullet which will instantly get you to the top rankings. Beware of any company who can guarantee you the top spot in a matter of minutes. They’re probably employing Black Hat methods which either won’t work or which will get your site black listed as soon as google picks up on what they are doing. Don’t get involved with companies like these.
Instead focus on building a great website, providing the best content and building a strong link profile. For an honest and fair assessment of your site and some positive advice on white hat SEO contact Nexus today.