SEO is a prevalent online marketing strategy, and so, competitive, but it’s consistently shocking at how a lot of business entrepreneurs and marketers choose not to engage in an SEO strategy just because of its superficial drawbacks or limitations. One of the major misperceptions is that SEO is costly, and it’s determined by the fact that some companies have expensive packages that cost an abundance of dollars per month. There is a chance that SEO can be extravagant for highly-competitive and national-scale businesses, but that doesn’t signify it’s unaffordable for the standard business owner.
In reality, there are several simple strategies you can implement yourself, for free, to skillfully optimize your site for search engines.
Here are some of the important things to do to enhance your website’s SEO:
Find out targeted keywords.
Look for the keywords that are relevant to your niche and have hardly any competitors. Google Trends and Google’s Keyword Tool in AdWords are a few free tools that are great in fetching all the data you require.
Remove duplicate content.
If any instances of duplicate content are found on your site, then Google Search Console will display the same. Generally, these are the result of canonicity mistakes (not a copy), but you still need to fix this to keep your website in a good position.
Fix 404 page not found errors.
These errors are like deadlocks, and nobody likes deadlocks. Once again, check Google Search Console for aid, and set up 301 redirects when needed to shut the gaps here.
Use unique title tag for each page.
Every page must have a title tag, of less than 70 characters, that explains the page, features the targeted keyword and is distinctive from every other title tag on your site.
Write a captivating Meta description for every page.
Each page must also have a Meta description, less than or equal to 160 characters, that more perfectly describes the page. The Meta description perhaps doesn’t have much of an impact on your actual page rankings, however, it definitely influences click-through rates. There’s proof that click-through rates affect rankings, still, make sure that your Meta descriptions are different, to the point and persuasive.
Systemize your URL structure.
Your URLs must have a breadcrumb trail and represent clear indicators of the content on the page, like the page title. Evade using a lot of or random strings of text in your URLs.
Update your blog frequently.
A lot of content is never a bad thing as long as it’s useful to the readers. Google of late unveiled an algorithm update that seems to favour new content, so you must keep your blog up-to-date to take advantage of.
Include H1, H2, H3, and more headers in your content.
Your content must be sensibly divided into subsections, with sub-heads and headlines. These require being marked with HTML tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to foster the Google process and recognize the objective and niche of your content.
Incorporate internal links.
Linking together the applicable pages of your site is excellent for user experience, and assists Google better identify the relationships between pages on your site. For sites on WordPress, there are plugins available that can automatically help, like SEO Auto links.
Optimize your images.
The images on your web page must be optimized for SEO as well, and that task is quite simple –title them properly, add descriptive ALT tags and keep them in the right format.
Refer to authoritative external sources
Google keeps tabs on what you link to in an article. Citing authoritative sources to support your claims will make your content more convincing and reliable to Google plus to your readers.
Include social media integrations.
Every piece of writing on your site should be followed by social share icons. This is because social shares provide as indirect ranking indicators, serving you the opportunity to earn more inbound links that pass authority support to your site.
Improve your website loading speed
This might seem to be simple or as complicated as you make it; there are a lot of ways to make a site quicker. That is by decreasing image sizes, installing a caching plugin, swapping hosting providers and removing unwanted plugins.
Upgrade for mobile devices.
The majority of Google search now takes place on mobile devices, so if your site isn’t mobile-friendly then you could be losing out on a huge part of traffic. Also, Google will not show your website notably in mobile search results if you ignore to optimize your site for mobile.
Earn some inbound links
As a surefire strategy, link-building needs huge investment, but if you are just initiating, you can earn some links by doing a few simple things
- Be active enough in your community to gain media coverage.
- Publish your opinion about a divisive topic you are eligible to write about.
- Reach out to a publication in your industry for guest blogging opportunity.
Weed out bad links
Make use of Google Search Console to download a list of links to your website. Later, assess your link profile and spot out “bad” links from low authority sources. Manually take them away or request to remove them by sending an email to the webmaster.
Go for content syndication
You are writing piles of great content, but are you posting it at the right place? Take out some time and syndicate your content through social media channels, which increases the chances that it will gross rank-boosting links to your site.
The final say
Keep in mind that tactics limited to these alone would not guarantee you a top ranking for a targeted keyword, nor are they fit to manage a campaign in the long term. However, they will give you a strong foundation and boost to create an ongoing strategy. Planning a full campaign from scratch is time consuming, tedious and requires a lot of persistence — and you might probably face stumbling blocks.
Moreover, money is the alternative to address these challenges– it saves your precious time and effort that you might have to expend to work it out yourself and connects you with specialists without delay. But even though, you will be paying for a return. Remember: Do not consider this as a divestment, rather consider it as an investment.
