89% of B2B buyers and 81% of online shoppers turn to Google when faced with a problem, challenge or even a choice. Thus it’s time for you to face the cold, harsh truth that without some presence on Google, your business is unlikely to survive long. In this article, you’ll learn the three core components of a strong SEO strategy.
To optimise a site, you need to improve ranking factors in three areas — technical website setup, content, and links. So, let’s go through them in turn.
- Technical Setup
For your website to rank on Google, three things must happen:
- First, a search engine needs find your pages on the Web.
- Then, it must scan them to understand their topics and identify their keywords.
- And finally, it needs to add them to its index — a database of all the content it has found on the web. This way, its algorithm can consider displaying your website for relevant queries.
A web page looks different for you and the search engine. You see a webpage as a collection of graphics, colours, text with its formatting, and links. However, to a search engine, it’s nothing but text. Therefore, as a result, any elements it cannot render this way remain invisible to the search engine. And so, despite your website looking fine to you, Google might find its content not up to scratch.
To catch Google’s algorithm’s attention there are few elements you should focus on:
Website navigation and links
Search engines explore sites just like you would which include following links. Search engine crawlers land on a page and follow links to find other content to analyse. But as mentioned above, they cannot see images. So, set the navigation and links as text-only.
Page speed
Search engines, analyse the load time of the page, which is the time it takes for a user to possibly read the page. Many website elements can affect it including image size.
Dead links or broken redirects
A dead link sends a user to a non-existent page. A broken link redirect points to a resource that might no longer be there.
Duplicate content
Pages containing the same or similar content confuse search engines. They become confused as to which content they should display in search results. Thus, search engines consider duplicate content as a negative factor.
- Content
Every time you use a search engine, you’re looking for information (content) on a particular issue or problem.
This content might come in different formats such as a blog post or a web page, video, product recommendation, and even a business listing. It’s all content.
While search engine crawlers explore a page, they determine its topic. Analysing elements like page length or its structure helps them assess its quality. Based on this information, search algorithms can match a person’s query with pages they consider the most relevant to it.
To optimise your content, you need to use keywords that match the words a user will most likely type into the search engine.
First, ensure that Google understands what keywords you want this page to rank. To achieve that, make sure you include at least the main keyword in the following:
- Post’s title
- URL:
- Heading 1 Tag
- The first 100 words (or the first paragraph) of content
- Meta-title and meta-description tags
- Image file names and ALT tags
You should also optimise Non-Keyword-Related On-Page Optimization Factors including the following:
- External links: Links that take users to external relevant pages on the topic.
- Internal links: This allows search engines to find and crawl other pages on the site.
- Content’s length: Long content typically ranks better
- Multimedia: Although not necessary, multimedia elements like videos, diagrams, audio players can signal a page’s quality.
- Links
Remember, your links must pass various quality criteria. Plus, it can’t be obvious to search engines that you’ve built them deliberately.
Here are some strategies to do it:
- Editorial, organic links: These backlinks originate from other websites that reference your content on their own.
- Outreach: Here, you contact other websites for links by creating an amazing piece of content, and email them to tell them about it. In turn, if they find it valuable, they’ll reference it.
- Guest posting: Guest posts are blog articles that you publish on third-party websites that include one or two links to your site in the content and author bio.
- Competitive analysis: Finally, many SEOs often analyse their competitors’ backlinks to identify those they could recreate for their sites too.
