Featured article by Evelina Adomaitytė, Independent Technology Author
Nowadays, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is more crucial than ever. It is an effective marketing strategy to get desired results out of your online business. It not only increases your website’s organic ranking but also provides a quick recognition to your brand in comparison to traditional marketing such as newspaper, billboards, etc.
As a result, everyone is obsessed with their search engine ranking. The higher your ranking, the higher your website shows up in keyword searches through top search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.
However, it can be quite challenging and time-consuming to decide, which SEO practice going to the best for your website. Therefore, it is necessary for every web owner to understand the true meaning of search engine optimization.
So let’s learn some basics about SEO and its functionality.
As you know, there are already millions of websites, how will you ensure that users will find your website if they search for your business on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, etc. Well! SEO is a marketing strategy that helps you increase both the quality and quantity of the web traffic to your website.
Now you might be wondering, how does it happen!
When a user searches for a query on a search engine, the results that he is shown is a list of websites having high domain authority and relevant information related to that query. And the right SEO strategies help you achieve quality information and high domain authority
Let’s understand it with an example. Suppose you’re searching for the ‘cheap web hosting companies’ in Google, the top results you are viewing are the ones that have a good reputation and adopted the best SEO practice as per the Google guidelines.
All popular search engines use state-of-the-art crawlers that accumulate the information on every website. Further, search engines create an index for every website.
Advantages of SEO for Your Business
-You get organic traffic. Organic traffic means when a user visits your site by clicking your targeted keyword on search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing. It can be achieved by optimizing the websites and its content with high-quality keywords.
-In comparison to traditional advertising method, SEO is quite budget-friendly and provides a better return on investment.
-It helps in enhancing business credibility. When people see your business in the top results of the Google they automatically start trusting you.
-It helps in brand awareness as well.
-If you’re practicing the right SEO for your website, you can definitely stay ahead of your competition.
3 Great Ways to Boost Your SEO in 2018
1.Get An XML SiteMap for Your Site
For those who don’t know, XML sitemap is an extensible markup language which is actually a text file that contains the URLs of every single page on your site. Unlike HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), XML is majorly designed to assist visitors searching your site and locate the pages they are looking for. The XML sitemap is primarily generated for search engines.
How to Generate Your XML Sitemap
Generating XML sitemap is exceptionally easy. There are numerous CMS available in the market that can automatically create yours. If your website is on WordPress, learnhow to create XML sitemap on WordPress. If not continue with the article.
You can generate XML in just a few steps.
-Visit XML-sitemaps
-Enter your site URL.
-Mention the frequency of your site, which is generally updated from the drop-down list.
-Next, pick an option under ‘Last modification’. It is the time when your URL was last modified.
-Click start. You might have to wait for few minutes.
-Your XML is ready, you can download it now.
Once you have downloaded it, next, you have to upload it to the root directory of your site and submit this URL to Google Webmaster tool.
Benefits of Submitting XML File
-It helps search engines learn more about your website and its pages that you want to be indexed.
-XML sitemap acts as a small static website that reminds search engines to check and re-evaluate your website.
-It helps your website recover from search engine penalties.
2.Give Your Site a Complete Audit (On Page SEO)
Most web owners always take website auditing back seat but it can literally improve SEO as well as conversion rate. A website audit is a complete analysis of your site, especially those elements that play a crucial role in the search visibility.
Below is a brief checklist for a website audit.
Onsite SEO-
-Make sure title and descriptions are unique for each page of your website. Also check whether their characters length is as per the latest search engine guidelines or not!
-Make sure you’re regularly updating your blog. Update it regularly with valuable, fresh and engaging content. Use copyright free images and videos only. Don’t forget to upload them using proper alt tags and title tags.
-Don’t ignore internal linking. It is useful for both users and search engines.
-Fix broken links in your site. You may use Xenu tool to identify all broken links of your site.
-Check the loading speed as well.
3.Approach Keyword Strategically
With the passage of time, search engine algorithm has become more advanced. Therefore, it is necessary to approach keyword strategically for your every post. And it can’t be achieved without doing accurate keyword research.
Make sure, keywords you have chosen are more specific to your business niche.
Let’s suppose you are the owner of a men’s leather shoes brand and do not deals in other shoe types. Therefore, you should optimize your website content for keyword ‘Mens leather shoes’ instead of men’s shoes. It will help you earn more targeted audience which will surely increase more conversion for your business.
Focus more on long-tail keywords.
Advantages of Long-Tail Keywords
-They provide significant search volume.
-Such keywords have less competition.
-They are more specific than generic keywords.
-They have a high conversion rate.
Hopefully, these 3 steps will help you boost your SEO ranking in 2018.
