These days, to successfully run a business in the modern world, you need a good website. Without good SEO, a website will not have any kind of impact. The site that you create will be the face of your brand and you will use it to spread awareness about your company. It is the best way to get popularity on the market and to get customers interested in your products.
However, as a beginner in leading a business, you probably have made a good looking website, you have added a payment processing service and your products, but it seems like no one is ever visiting it, let alone buying from it. It is time to question what you have been doing wrong and the changes you can do to start bringing in a profit.
To ease you into this subject and what SEO exactly stands for, we have made this short but intricate guide for 2024.
What is SEO?
First things first, you first need to understand what SEO exactly means. It means search engine optimization. What does this exactly mean? Well, it basically means that you are optimizing your content for search engines that most people online use. Google is one of the most important search engines on the Internet right now and if you want to show up on its results, you must have a good SEO rating.
This search engine optimization algorithm is constantly changing and you will need to have a good understanding of how it changes and what you will need to do to keep up with it.
How does it work?
It is important to mention that there is SEO on every other search engine that people use, it is not just Google. Although they do have a bit different algorithms, they essentially work very similarly. If you are well ranked on Google, you will probably be well ranked on Bing and Yahoo! too.
So, how does all of this work? Well, we can’t know exactly how Google’s algorithm works because that is something that they keep private. There is no transparency of their coding and the AI they use, but they do share some of the changes they make from time to time.
With the use of sophisticated machine learning or what many people would call artificial intelligence, they go through the content of millions of websites and then compare it to their ranking factors. For example, how unique are the texts, the quality of the images used in the article, connection to social media such as Facebook or Instagram, the use of keywords, etc.
If you want to understand how SEO really works and the entire logic behind, you should check the podcast on Sirlinksalot.co, as they talk about various aspects of it, including what we just mentioned.
Most important factors
To properly optimize your website for search engines, you will need to understand what affects your ranking the most.
1. Security
One of the factors that has the most influence on a search engine’s results, is the site’s security. Google and other SEs are made to provide customers with reliable and safe sites. Webpages that sell information without consent or ones that are filled with malware will probably never even show up on the SE’s results. Even if you went to the last page it won’t show up.
So, what exactly is a secure site? Well, to get a secure site for your brand, you will need to pay for an SSL certificate. The Secure Sockets Layer protocol is used to create a safe link between the clients and the server (your webpage). This is something the SEO will always check, so make sure that you do have an SSL certificate. Keep in mind that this certificate for security can expire after some time, so make sure you keep track of the date since you purchased it.
2. Loading times
Have you ever gotten on a website that takes seconds or sometimes even minutes to load? Most of the time, if it takes more than 5 seconds to load entirely, customers will immediately close it down and look at other results. Since Google is aiming to provide its customers with the best possible experience always, its algorithm pushes all of the slower webpages at the bottom of the result pages while the ones that are quick are on the top.
Fixing the loading speed can be done in two ways. It is either the hosting server that is bottlenecking or your coding. This means that you will either need to invest a bit more dollars into the server hosting services or hire a better web developer that will optimize your webpage for speed.
3. Phone-friendly
It is no secret that people today are constantly on their phones and it is their preferred devices when surfing the Internet, playing games, or whatever else they want to do. Most of the traffic that you will be getting on your website will be from people that are on their smartphones or tablets.
This is why it is very important that you optimize your webpage for phones too and not just computers. This means that it must resize to fit the screen of smaller devices while still looking good. Larger fonts will need to be implemented, easy access, and a bunch of other things to make your customer’s life easier.
4. Content
Once you have optimized your website for the best viewing experience possible, it is time to cater to the content that you post. This is what most people are looking for and the algorithm will be using it to rank your site too. For example, an automotive parts website would have automotive-specific content published. These things are best left to the experts like automotive seo companies.
You will have to ensure that it is grammatically correct, that you are using the right keywords and that it is relatable to your customers.
After following these four factors to optimize your website, you will certainly get a much better SEO ranking.
