Is your website just not getting the kind of traffic you’d hoped for? Did it used to get a lot of traffic but now gets considerably less? You need a better SEO strategy to Optimize Your Website for Search.
Optimizing your website for search helps it show up in the top results returned by search engines. Ideally, you want your website to come up in the first five to ten results returned for your chosen keywords. An SEO professional can help with auditing your site for SEO, but there’s a lot you can do to boost your SEO, too. One of the most important things you can do is write good, sticky content that creates value for your users and keeps them coming back. You’ll also need to do keyword research before adding content to your webpage, update your website regularly with strong, link-worthy content, and use metadata to help search engines classify your page.
Produce Good Content
The days of being able to reach the top of search returns on the strength of an SEO keyword alone are over. These days, Google ranks websites largely based on how much value they create for users. So, the most important thing you can do to boost your website’s SEO is to populate it with good, strong, sticky content that will create value for your users, entertain them, and give them the information they need.
For example, if you sell shoes, you can draw in web traffic by publishing long, information-rich blog posts about how to buy shoes for different occasions, what shoes are best for different athletic activities, and so on. Make brand recommendations. Compare different shoes of the same type. Post videos about how different shoes function to support the feet during different activities. The right information will draw users in, and if you can keep them on your site with interesting content, that will lower your bounce back rate and help your page rank higher in Google search returns.
Research Keywords Carefully
Just because search keywords are no longer then end-all, be all of SEO doesn’t mean they aren’t important to achieving a good search ranking. Use SEO keyword tools to find the best short- and long-tail keywords for your site. Keywords tell Google what your site is about, and help users find your site in a search.
When choosing keywords, think about what terms your users are going to search to find the information they want. Don’t stuff too many keywords into your content – that will hurt your search rankings. Use keywords in your title (and website URL, if possible), headings, subheadings, and metadata. Use your main keyword in the first and last paragraphs of your content, and a couple of times in the middle. If you struggle with choosing the right keywords, hiring professional SEO services can help.
Update Your Website Regularly
Google will rank your site as more relevant if it’s updated regularly with good content. Make sure you or your SEO professional audits your website for SEO regularly – perhaps every three to six months. Blogging is a great way to add new content to your page that will draw in search traffic and keep your page relevant. You can use regular blog posts to highlight business updates and share news, or to give readers information on relevant topics they might care about. Link out to useful resource sites and don’t forget to include internal links to other pages and blog posts to keep readers on your page for longer.
Use the Right Metadata
Metadata, or data that contains information about other data, consists of the keywords that appear in your title and subheadings, and in the HTML code your website is built on. You may need the help of an SEO professional to identify, optimize, and regularly audit your site’s metadata. Your title metadata is the most important type, so make sure you use titles that include strong keywords.
You also need strong description metadata. Description metadata consists of about two keyword-rich sentences that appear in the description of your page that comes up in search returns. It should accurately describe the contents of your webpage or blog post in a way that entices users to go to and spend time on your website.
When your website is properly optimized for search, you’ll get more traffic, more activity on your forums, more comments on your blog, and more sales conversions. It can be a lot of hard work, but it’s worth it to get your site to the top of search returns, where users can find it easily.