Are you interested in boosting the number of visitors to your website? Improving your level of engagement with your audience and writing appropriate meta descriptions are just a few of the many simple things that you can do.
A Quick Introduction To SEO
As we discussed in our previous blog post, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a vital tool in boosting your website traffic. Over the years, companies such as Google and Yahoo! have incrementally improved their ability to “weed out” the more artificial and less reputable SEO techniques and are now penalizing websites and content providers that choose to implement them. SEO techniques that may have been highly effective ten or fifteen years ago can now prove to be ineffective and damaging.
You Can Start Today
The best SEO techniques are the ones that don’t really focus improving search results at all. Instead, it is important to simply focus on improving the overall user experience of your website. Believe it or not, it is fairly simple to start improving your user experience and boosting your search engine ranking. Better still, many of these techniques don’t require technical knowledge or any costly investments of resources.
Optimize Your Metadata
To begin, study the tools and features that are already included in your website’s Content Management System (CMS), especially when posting blog content. Many CMS and blogging platforms like WordPress have SEO optimization tools built-in that can help optimize your content before you post it. These tools include categories and tags for your blog posts, custom URls, and options to add metadata. Creating appropriate meta descriptions and titles is extremely important to help search engines properly index your webpages. It is also important to write meta descriptions for images as well. This not only helps to improve your SEO but can also assist site-impaired visitors that rely on specialized screen readers to surf the Web.
Archived Content
Next, review the content that already exists or is “archived” on your website. It is important to review how this content is organized and how easy it is to locate – this is also known as findability. Can your website users easily locate blog posts and content? Furthermore, can visitors easily navigate away from archived material back to your homepage or current content? Finally, is your content neatly organized and categorized? If properly addressed, all of the above will help improve your search engine ranking.
Create Relevant And Engaging Experiences
It may also be necessary to perform an assessment of your overall content and marketing strategy, including your social media strategy. Search engines are interested in presenting the most relevant websites and content to their users, therefore it is vital that your website and web content be, well, relevant! How often do you update your blog? Do you have active social media accounts, and do you regularly engage with your audiences through social media? Do you produce rich media for your blog and social media accounts, including images, infographics, guides and videos? The more engagement you have with your audience, the more interested search engines will be in promoting and elevating your website and content in their search results.