Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide: Fundamentals
Every website is built for certain users. Indeed, it is essential that users can find your website easily. Therefore, when you build a website, you should try to make it easy for your potential audiences to explore your content.
Search engines are considered the first users of your content since they help users find the content they are looking for. SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) is used to help search engines better understand websites’ content.
In general, by knowing and implementing search fundamentals to your website you can enhance your website’s presence in search results. You should know SEO is not limited to optimizing websites, but also other disciplines such as branding, content marketing, coding and web development, content design, and user experience. But how does search engine optimization work?
Some complex algorithms are used by Google, or any other search engine, to determine which websites can be at the top of search results. However, the algorithms consider several parameters. These parameters can be website speed, keywords, or mobile friendliness.
The following starter guide helps your website to have a better presence on Google search results based on SEO:
Helping search engines to find your website: The first thing you should do is to check to see if the Google search engine can find your website’s content. If your website did not show up on search results, it is better to make sure that nothing technically prevents it from appearing in search results.
Reduce duplicate content: Duplicate content is when websites show the same content with different URLs. Having duplicate content on your website leads to a bad experience for users. This also can lead to wasting crawling resources on useless URLs by search engines.
Make a useful website: An interesting website with useful, high-quality content can be a big help for your website to have a better presence on search results.
On-page SEO: Optimizing the website’s pages and content to increase their rankings. It includes meta descriptions (a short text beneath the title tag that is shown in search results), title and header tags, and image optimization (writing alt text using keywords in the photographs).
Optimizing Keywords: It means selecting keywords that are related to your website’s content. You can search these keywords yourself or use Google Keyword Planner. It’s crucial to use these keywords in titles, headings, and body text. However, you should avoid keyword stuffing.
Off-page SEO: It refers to optimizing elements and activities outside of the site that can affect your website’s rankings. We can mention backlinks as the most important ones. These are the external links from other websites that point to your website. Search engines such as Google consider backlinks in the website’s authority.
Mobile Optimization: Nowadays, most people use their smartphones to search for what they’re looking for. Therefore, your site needs to be mobile-friendly. Indeed, mobile optimization can improve user experience and search engine rankings. Google or any other search engine priorities websites that are mobile-friendly in the mobile search results.
UX (user experience): Another element to enhance your website’s presence on search results is having a fast-loading website that includes responsive design. This can help improve user experience.
Tracking the website’s success: After you have done all of the steps above, it’s time to measure your website’s success and check if there’s a need to make changes. By using some tools such as Google Analytics or Google Search Console, you can track the performance of your website (the success, traffic, or ranking of the site). The information you get from these tools can help you refine your strategy if needed to enhance your website’s presence in search results.
Some common mistakes you should avoid in Search Engine Optimization include:
Underestimating search intent: When it comes to SEO, one of the elements that can help you is search intent. Indeed, you should know why users search for certain keywords and then try to align your content to users' intent.
Not having a well-defined strategy for SEO: By having an SEO strategy, you can set clear goals for your website and get better results.
Not having a sitemap: it’s crucial to create a sitemap since it can help google or other search engines understand the structure of your website.
In conclusion, Search Engine Optimization is crucial for every website. You can enhance the search engine rankings of your site, attract more potential audiences, and reach your goals by implementing the fundamentals of SEO on your website.
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