One of the most critical elements in growing a business is having great SEO strategies and habits that ensure great results. You can only be as successful as your knowledge will allow you to be. If you are not an SEO expert or lack the basic knowledge on where to start with improving your SEO, then continue reading. We have compiled 6, basic, easy to understand concepts that you can use to improve your SEO. This article is not a comprehensive list, it only covers 6 of the most basic principles that you can use to get started on your SEO adventure. Take each concept listed here and learn as much as you can. Mastering these 6 SEO principles will surely gain you great search engine placement in no time.
1: Content
Have you ever heard the phrase that Content is King! The truth is that content is everything when it comes to creating a spectacular website. The search engines of today are highly focused on ranking websites by the quality of your content. You want information that is useful, and informational. This ensures that that your content is clicked on and shared by readers across the web. The more people that share your content, the faster Google or Bing will put you on the first page.
2: Regular updates
Regularly updating your website is a good way to give search engines fresh content to index. This is a practice that all the major websites use to increase their SEO rankings. When you update your website you are increasing the link authority of your websites. In fact, some large websites have over 300 pages of content that includes articles, blogs, and other website content. The more you can update, the better your rankings will be.
3: Speed
One of the algorithms Google uses for SEO ranking is website speed. A slow webpage speed could negatively affect your website indexation. The rule of thumb is that you want your pages to load in under 4 seconds. Three good resources for testing your website speed are Google Pagespeed, GT Metrix, and Pingdom. If you are using Pagespeed you want your website to have at least a score of 50. There are several things you can do to speed up your website, but a lot will depend on what your website was created with. if you are using a WordPress site, you can download lazy loader and W3 Total Cache plugin to help speed up your site. If you have an HTML site, simple things like minifying your code can also help.
4: Metadata
Having good Metadata is like having a good trailer for your website. When you watch a movie trailer, that trailer will determine how you feel about the actual movie. The same is true with your metadata. When people searching the web come across your metadata, they will use that snippet of information to decide if your website is worth clicking on or not. Metadata is found on search engines underneath your headlines. It can also be edited in the dashboard of your WordPress platform, or other platform that you have used to create your website.
5: Good Quality links
Having good quality links is a necessary challenge that you must overcome. There are many different types of links that your website must contain in order to achieve maximum SEO rankings. You must have internal links that link users from one page on your website to another page on your website. You must also have backlinks. These are links on other websites or blogs that link back to your website. These two strategies will give your website high domain authority and will increase your SEO rankings.
6: Use alt tags for images
Search engines cannot interpret images when they crawl your website. Therefore it is important to give them alt tags to interpret. Alt tags are descriptions of an image that you have on your website. Sometimes, viewers cannot process images either. This can be due to connection speeds or server issues. When this occurs, your alt tag will give the viewer a description of what they should be seeing. This can impact your SEO by allowing your website to be properly indexed with a complete listing of information.
