If you’re running a business, you’re probably considering building a website where you can sell and promote your products and services. It’s a great way to establish your brand, reach your target audience, and boost your revenue. When creating a website, you’ve most likely heard of the term ‘search engine optimization’ and the power it possesses to drive your business.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a compilation of practices formulated to keep your website on top of search results by improving its ranking performance. It helps people discover your website through organic search results.
If you’re planning to establish an SEO campaign, you need to start with SEO project management planning. This will help you define your goals, such as converting leads and boosting organic traffic. Also, you can’t establish robust SEO marketing without a clear and strategic plan.
Furthermore, you might want to consider some of the most effective tips to improve your SEO campaign. These may not secure the top placement for you, but they can help people and search engines locate your website. Here are the following tips:
1. Use Relevant Keywords
Keywords are an essential element in SEO. If you can use them correctly and effectively, you’ll be able to attract more people to visit your website. These are three main types of keywords you need to know about:
- Primary keywords are the focus of your content, so your article and its title should emulate them.
- Secondary keywords support primary keywords so that your content will make sense to your readers.
- Additional keywords are related keywords that mean the same as the previous two but are spelled differently, like synonyms.
So, how many keywords do you need for SEO? It’s strongly recommended to have around three to eight keywords, depending on the length of an article. Here’s a possible breakdown:
- One primary keyword
- A maximum of three secondary keywords
- A maximum of four additional keywords
If you try to incorporate more than eight keywords into a not-so-long article, it could become spammy. Also, adding them organically is difficult, so avoid doing it, especially when it’s not necessary.
2. Optimize The Speed Of Your Website
Loading speed is a crucial factor to consider in SEO. Having high-quality content would mean nothing if your page’s speed is as slow as a tortoise. This can deter potential customers from making a purchase since they’ll see your website as unreliable and untrustworthy.
Furthermore, it has been discovered that almost 50% of people leave websites that take more than 2 seconds to load completely. That being said, you might want to learn some tips that will help optimize your site’s speed, such as:
- Use a content delivery network to redirect users to the nearest servers available to reduce processing time.
- Optimize your images by compressing them to reduce their file size.
- Reduce your plugins, especially unnecessary ones that only add extra processing time.
- Minify the number of cascading style sheets (CSS) and hypertext markup language (HTML) files to improve website processing time.
- Cache your website to reduce or remove unnecessary database requests.
Use these strategies to boost your website’s loading speed and prevent organic visitors from leaving for other optimized sites.
3. Link Relevant Websites
Including links from relevant and highly-authoritative websites is an effective technique to boost your site’s search engine rankings. It may sound off since it possibly takes your viewers away from your platform. But that’s not actually the case.
Providing essential links could make your website more credible and valuable. It helps your readers learn everything they need to understand a specific topic better. That’s why it’s important to add links, even if they include your competitors’ sites.
However, make sure only to include links relevant to the topic and offer great value. Also, you can notify the pages that you use, and if they find it significant to their growth, they may consider including a link to your site.
Furthermore, what matters the most is the quality of the link you use. Having plenty of links can only harm your site more than good, especially if most of them are poor-quality links with poor SEO rankings.
4. Create A Simple URL
If people don’t understand your URL, neither do search engines, which might lead to confusion. It doesn’t matter if the URL you produce is lengthy, as long as it’s relevant to the users and search engines.
For example, an effective URL structure should be like this: https://abcd.com/blog/10-good-nursery-rhymes-for-kids-and-toddlers/.
As you notice, it’s easy to understand what to expect in the link since there are no unnecessary numbers and characters that can cause confusion. On the other hand, here’s an example of a URL structure you need to avoid as much as possible: https://abcd.com/article/1234567, which doesn’t make any sense at all.
Also, it’s important to take note of having a short URL structure that allows people to memorize and remember them easily. Having around three to five words would be good. Here’s a good example: https://abcd.com/blog/10-nursery-rhymes/.
5. Use Reliable Web Analytics
When you implement your SEO campaign, you need to have reliable software that will help you track its performance and success. It will show which aspect of your campaign work well and which don’t.
Some examples of analytic tools you can use are Google Analytics, Microsoft Power BI, and other private solutions.
On top of that, make sure that you have these tools set up before you launch your SEO marketing campaign to take note of and evaluate every tiny detail.
6. Produce Unique Meta Description
Writing a well-crafted meta description is one of the most underutilized but important elements of an effective SEO strategy. But first, what is a meta description?
It’s a small snippet that summarizes what’s inside the content. You can find it in search results when your keywords are located in the description. That’s why it’s important to produce and optimize it to improve your SEO rankings. Utilizing a meta description generator can be a smart approach to ensure consistency and effectiveness in your meta descriptions.
Here are some characteristics of a good meta description:
- It contains at least 155 words.
- It uses an active voice.
- It has a call-to-action, such as ‘click here’
- It includes primary keywords.
- Make sure it’s unique and has no duplicates.
Final Words
SEO is one of the most important elements of an effective and powerful website as it drives organic traffic and generates potential leads.
As a beginner, the only way to a successful SEO strategy is to learn how it works from the basics. Use the tips presented above for better outcomes and conquer the search engine result pages (SERPs).
The tips include using relevant keywords, optimizing loading speed, link building, simplifying URLs, using analytic tools, and writing relevant meta-descriptions. If you don’t know where to begin, you may consult professional SEO service providers to better understand the process.
