SEO – also known as search engine optimization, is a form of marketing that has continued to grow in terms of market share and value in the recent years. SEO is all about optimizing a website to rank highly in the search results displayed by search engines like Google and Bing. The actual marketing services involved can take place both internally on the website, as well as externally via other websites linking back to the site in questions, also known as backlinks.
In this article, we will review some of the things that you should be aware of when you start optimizing your website.
Content Optimization
Content optimization, also called onpage SEO, is all the work you can perform on the site itself. It consists in text and keyword optimization of content, and focusing on readability and quality.
When you write your content, there are a number of things to be aware of. In the old days, it was about stuffing the texts with enough keywords on as many pages as possible that did the trick. However, Google and other engines has since then moved on to more sophisticated ranking schemes, and today it is important to focus on quality above all else.
Therefore, today, when you optimize your site, you should think about writing directly to the user. What do your users need to know to be able to take next steps in the process of buying, downloading, or anything else? Once you have written a good and useful text with the reader in focus, you can subsequently work on optimizing the text for engines. However, you should be careful here. You can take great advantage from what you call keyword density, which also means keyword density. That’s how many % a keyword constitutes of a page. Here it is a good idea and best practice to stay between 2 and 5%.
When we talk to content optimization, you should use your keyword in the H1 headline, page title, and possibly in some of your subtitles, if that makes sense.
User behavior
Reading users’ behavior on a website is something that Google is getting better and better at. What Google is looking at here is, among other things, the rate of rejection, the time spent on the page, the number of pages per visit, and the user engagement.
These are excellent numbers to assess whether a user has found the content of your website relevant to the given search. Therefore, this is something that you should work actively with when you want to search engine optimize your website as it is something Google weighs more and more. If you’re thinking of writing to your visitors instead of Google, you’ve already come a long way.
Link Building
Linkbuilding is one of the largest single items in SEO, and it is also typical here how many companies are having difficulty allocating enough resources for this crucial part. A link serves as a recommendation from another website, and the more links a website has, the better chances for a good search engine ranking placement it gets. Quantity alone is not enough however, and one strong link can be worth several thousand weak ones, so tread carefully. Obtaining links requires work and, not least, good relationships. Here are a few great suggestions for link sources:
- Website owners
- Online magazines
- Friends and family
- Bloggers
- Press releases
- Forums
- Social Media
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