The world wide web is becoming a busier place with every passing year. While this is a good indicator that business is booming, it also means that it is becoming more congested as well.
It is more important than ever to be SEO literate so that your web property doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. While you should consider hiring an expert SEO to fine tune your operations at some point, these basic SEO tips will position your website to make a run at the #1 slot for the keywords that you are targeting.
1) Don’t forget about social media
While SEO has been around since the start of the web, the prominence of social media ranking factors has been more of a recent trend. Optimizing social media should be a priority for businesses looking to take advantage of this new traffic-building method.
Participation on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram show no signs of abating, so it’s reasonable to assume that social shares will make up a bigger part of the SEO pie in the years ahead.
2) Get your titles and meta descriptions right
While it’s important to anticipate what is coming, you shouldn’t ignore the fundamentals of SEO. Getting people to click on your links starts with having titles and meta descriptions that accurately describe what your site is about.
Not only that, but your copy mustn’t mislead people on what is contained within. Bounce rate (those that leave quickly after landing on a given page) weighs heavily against a site’s ranking if this statistic is too high. As such, it is important to resist the temptation to write cheap clickbaitey titles and descriptions.
3) Structure your permalinks correctly
Many content creators ignore the significance of a web link that is machine readable by search engine crawlers. For example, yoursite.com/23672378.html tells us absolutely nothing about your page, whereas yoursite.com/how-to-improve-the-seo-of-a-website makes it perfectly clear what information is contained within.
4) Add in internal and external authority links
Search engine bots also look for links in the web pages that it explores. Many algorithms place a large amount of value on this factor, so be sure to place some internal and external links in pages that you are trying to promote to Google or Bing.
The text you use to link an existing internal page should contain keywords that pertain to the subject of that page, so don’t hyperlink random words or phrases when doing performing this task. External links are also important, but the single greatest way to get them to benefit you is to have another site with lofty domain authority stats to link to your page.
This is easier said than done, but if you can get enough of these high value domains to link to the page you are working on, it will move up the rankings fairly quickly.