When it comes to the best SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tactics, this is any activity that helps you improve your ranking on search engines such as Google, Bing, and others. With over 3.9 billion internet users and over 3.3 billion searches being performed each day, securing a good rank isn’t easy. That’s exactly why SEO techniques are so important for businesses.
And if you have a local business, selling products or services, you have to think about the local ranking of your website. Local optimization will help you surface related search queries in your area. As such, this is where tools such as On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, Local Search Engine Optimization, and International Search Engine Optimization come in handy.
As Google shows local results first in a lot of cases, you need to make sure Google understands where you are located. Search engines serve millions of users per day looking for answers to their questions or for solutions to their problems. In this article, I’ve explained more in detail all the local SEO things you can do to improve Google’s understanding of your location.
What Is SEO?
By definition, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a marketing discipline focused on growing organic website visibility in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website as a result. Unlike PPC marketing, this form of marketing does not incur any payments unless when consulting with an SEO expert.
In other words, it’s the process of improving the position that your website appears in the “organic” search results. For example, those returned by sites search engines such as Google, Yandex, Bing, Yahoo, etc. SEO isn’t just about building yourself a search engine-friendly website, but, it’s about making your site better for people to use.
At jmexclusives, we believe that; these principles go hand-in-hand. While keeping in mind that, in today’s competitive market, Search Engine Optimization is more important than ever. Surprisingly, for beginners to SEO, the above definition may sound complicated. In simpler terms, it’s the methods and ways used to improve your site ranking in the search results.
By so doing, SEO will help your site appear closer to the top positions in the search results and on the first pages affiliated with a variety of search engines. Such topmost search engines include; Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, ask.com, AOL.Com, Baidu, and other topmost best search engines that make both our work and that of web users much easier.
Why Is SEO So Important?
There are many aspects to Search Engine Optimization that have an outcome benefit to webmasters and web-based business owners in the end. In particular, from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web. As we aforementioned, the ultimate goal of SEO for business is to generate organic traffic — searchers clicking through.
Specifically, they’ll search all way down to your website from a search engine results page (SERP) like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and the like. In short, it is crucial because it makes your website more visible, and that means more traffic and more opportunities to convert prospects into customers.
Sometimes SEO is simply a matter of making sure your site is structured in a way that search engines understand. On the other hand, Search Engine Optimization has dramatically evolved in the past two years mostly driven by Google’s updates to its indexing algorithm.
For example, Google’s algorithm updates (code names: Penguin, Panda, Panda 2) are now mostly focused on rewarding websites that develop relevance through content. Rather than using technical tricks to game the search results ranking system. Another key element that Google’s algorithm rewards are how many times the content has been shared and interacted with on social media.
As a consequence, the power of SEO has shifted from the hands of technicians to the hands of marketers and content producers. With that in mind, there are some essential aspects of quality website SEO practices that you need to consider.
The key aspects include;
- Technical crawlability
- Website content publishing
- Keyword relevance
- Linkbacks (referral links)
- Social Media interactions
- Content update frequency
- Website user experience
- Integration with Google services.
As I mentioned earlier, search engine optimization is nowadays more important than ever and it is necessary for every webmaster to understand the true meaning of SEO. As well as the potential it creates for every business.
And as can be seen, from the above definitions, search engine optimization or SEO, in short, is a set of rules that can be followed by the website (or blog) owners. In that case, to optimize their websites for search engines and thus improve their search engine rankings.
Related Topic: What is Keywords Search? A Step-by-step Beginners Guide
Keep in mind, if you’re in the mobile phone space or travel, you’ll be fighting a losing battle unless you’ve got a sizeable budget to spend.
However, if you’re offering a niche product or a service in a defined geographical area, you stand a pretty good chance of at least getting to page one if you are patient enough. In addition, it is a great way to increase the quality of your websites by making them user-friendly, faster, and easier to navigate.
SEO is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results. But, it encompasses both technical and creative elements. All this is required to improve rankings, drive traffic, and increase awareness in search engines. See other additional benefits below;
1. Website Ranking
Sites that appear higher up in the results will get more traffic to their pages. Coupled with potentially more landing page visits, lead conversion, and product sales in your business. Your goal is to get to page one and ideally to position one.
But whether that is feasible largely depends on the market that you are operating in. Search Engine Optimization encompasses both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings. Including, driving on-site traffic, increasing awareness through search engines, and your content listing on web pages.
2. Search Engine Search Results
The majority of search engine users are more likely to click on one of the top 5 suggestions. Especially in the search results pages (SERPs).
So, you can take advantage of this and gain visitors to your website or customers to the online store you need to be in the top positions. It’s not only about search engines but good SEO practices improve the user experience and usability of a website.
3. SEO Keywords
On one hand, users trust search engines, and having a presence in the top positions for the keywords the user is searching, increases the website’s trust. While on the other hand, SEO is good for the social promotion of your website.
People who find your website by searching Google or Yahoo are more likely to promote it on various social media platforms. Such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or other social media channels.
4. Traffic Increase
In reality, SEO is important for the smooth running of a big website. Whereas, Websites with more than one author can benefit from SEO in a direct and indirect way.
Their direct benefit is an increase in search engine traffic and their indirect benefit is having a common framework (checklists) to use before publishing content on the site. Therefore, SEO can put you ahead of the competition.
5. Link Building
Building links called backlinks is one of the many other tactics used in search engine optimization. Especially, because links are a signal to Google that your site is a quality resource worthy of citation.
Therefore, sites with more backlinks tend to earn higher rankings. A link-building campaign is a process of actively trying to increase lead links to your website. Usually accompanied by some kind of overarching objective.
It will use assets belonging to the website in order to acquire those links, and an asset can be anything from content and news to products and services. Backlinks are links on one website that, when clicked, take the user to another site.
As an example;
- This is a link,
- Click here,
- Example,
- josephmuciraexclusives.com,
- https://josephmuciraexclusives.com are good cases of backlinks.
Additionally, website backlinks can be in the form of an image as well as text. An anchor text link is the text that’s used to create the clickable part of a backlink.
Which Are The Main SEO Types?
For beginner SEOs, there’s a low-hanging fruit opportunity when it comes to webpages’ SEO content audits. And whether or not your existing content was SEO optimized when you created it, there’s still an opportunity. Especially, to make a few quick tweaks and reap the rewards of more organic traffic.
Clearly, talking in terms of Content SEO Audit, organic search drives almost 51% of all web traffic and 40% of revenue. That’s why organic search marketing teams (say jmexclusives) continually aim to generate more search traffic. Perse, try to rank on page one for a keyword in a search engine, and you’ll see how your organic traffic increases.
More often than not, when someone talks about improving their SEO they mean on-page SEO. And as Google’s algorithm develops, so should your website. In general, there are five different types of SEO that are all equally important. So, you should have a good grasp of each type in order to fully optimize them. And then, you can best utilize the ones that best suit your needs.
#1: On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO (aka On-Page Optimization or On-Site SEO) is the practice or rather the process of maximizing the results your web content achieves from search engines query. Including improvements in rankings, organic traffic, and conversions. These existing content optimization opportunities tend to come in two scenarios though.
It helps you identify issues regarding your content, title tags, h1 tags, meta descriptions, and images all play into your website’s on-page SEO. In order to optimize, you’ll want to avoid any duplicate content, titles, descriptions, or h1 tags. You’ll also need to make sure that your content, titles, and descriptions are all at an optimal length.
Site Audit checks for over a dozen of the most common on-page SEO issues, so you can identify all of the mistakes on your site that could be hurting you. For instance, it could be that you did Keyword Research before creating the content, or it could be general content SEO Audit afterward.
Learn More: On-Page SEO | The Best Practices For Site Content Audit
In that case, opportunities might look different depending on which of these two scenarios apply to you. In other words, On-Page SEO content optimization refers to all measures that can be taken directly within the website.
As I mentioned, your website’s appearance on the Search Engine Results Page is highly determined by a number of ranking factors. Including your general website accessibility, page speed, optimized content, keywords, title tags, etc. In short, On-page SEO is about optimizing the stuff that you have control over and can change on your own website.
Oftentimes, we do so in order to improve our position in the search rankings. Examples of this include measures to optimize the content or improve the meta description and title tags. Conversely, Off-Page Optimization (aka Off-Page SEO) refers to links and other signals.
#2: Off-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO is the practice or rather the process that focuses on maximizing or increasing the authority of your website domain through the act of getting links from other similar or related websites. Including improvements in the backlink building, organic anchor text linking, and website mentions lead conversions.
Unlike On-Page SEO, a good analogy for how authority works is this. Let’s say you have a bathtub with rubber duckies in it (the ducks are your pages). And then, you start filling the tub with water (links). Well, in the end, all your duckies are going to rise to the top.
You can use a tool such as the Link Explorer by Moz: The world’s best backlink checker with over 40 trillion links.
Talking of Off-Page SEO, there’s a score called “Domain Authority” which is the key determinant factor. For one thing, it calculates how authoritative your website is compared to other sites. As an example, you can type your domain name into the Moz Link Explorer to see your score. You can also click on the image above to get started.
Eventually, this is how even a huge website like Wikipedia ranks for pretty much everything under the sun. Bearing in mind, it has so much water in its bathtub. Such that; if you throw another rubber duck in it, it’s going to float to the top without any other effort.
#3: Local SEO
When you optimize local SEO, you are focusing on reaching customers and increasing visibility in a targeted geographic area. This type of SEO is important for local businesses that have a brick-and-mortar location. Local SEO can increase both web traffic and foot traffic. Targeting local SEO can help your website and business rank first when a customer in your area does a search.
Using local SEO can help you increase traffic for the specific cities, suburbs, or neighborhoods that you wish to target and serve. An example of utilizing local SEO is a Google My Business page, which appears at the top of a Google search and includes information such as your hours, location, phone number, and website.
#4: International SEO
Technically, International SEO refers to optimizing your search presence for people who are in different countries or speak different languages. Whereby, for it to be successful, it uses elements such as geo-targeting, Hreflang tags, and other localization signals. More so, in order to target web content on basis of users from around the world.
Google makes efforts to match search results to the language and location of the searcher. Special signals you add on your website help Google or other search engines know when your site has content that would be suitable for someone who is in a particular country or is searching in a specific language.
In other words, if you know that a good share of your website visitors come from a different country than where you’re located, speak different languages, or both, then it may be time to make some changes to your website. More so, in order to create a better experience for all of your international visitors.
On the surface, International SEO may seem like a totally foreign concept, but in reality, you may be more familiar with it than you know. In nutshell, think of international SEO as a Geotargeting practice. But, instead of optimizing your website to attract traffic from your city or state, you’re optimizing it for different countries and languages.
#5: Technical SEO
Overall, Technical SEO is when you improve all your other SEO aspects to get a higher ranking on search engines. Any SEO task that doesn’t relate to creating content can be considered technical SEO. An example of technical SEO is the user experience, which consists of page speed and load times, as well as how easy your website is to use and navigate.
You want your website to load quickly for users because if it takes too long, people might give up and go to a competing website. Optimizing your site for technical SEO also decreases the bounce rate. Bounce rate is an important factor search engines take in when ranking search engines. Your website should have well and quality structured data too.
So that search engines can quickly tell what kind of information your website presents. For similar reasons, you also want your website to include an XML sitemap that lists all the pages on your website. Another example of technical SEO is having a mobile-friendly version of your website.
The Best Routine Practices For SEO Webmasters
Notably, using tools such as Google AdWords or Google Trend, website owners and content publishers can identify which keywords related to their products and services are the most searched for in Search Engines. There is little traffic value in focusing on using keywords that very few people if any, use to look for content.
As of today, Search Engines have become extremely smart at dis-ciphering the meaning of the content of a page. Search engine optimization (SEO) aims to increase traffic to your website through organic search engine results. Therefore, it encompasses many tasks and strategies that might be difficult to implement without help from some tools and plugins.
Never use keywords that are not relevant to the overall topic of a content page. There are so many ways to boost your site’s SEO ranking for the Search Results as you’ll learn later on in other blogs.
Consider elements such as;
- Picking a good web host.
- Starting with your WordPress Blog.
- Alter the default permalinks structure.
- Install a .xml sitemap plugin.
- Install an SEO plugin and start using rel=” canonical.”
- Nofollow untrusted and useless links.
- Noindex duplicate page types.
- Use a caching plugin to speed up your blog.
Link Building Strategies Vs Tactics
- Strategy = overall plan.
- Tactic = the actual means used to gain an objective.
- NOTE. Links can get removed for other reasons. …
- Answer: Because they probably don’t know that a better piece of content exists.
- Solution: Introduce them to your content and ask them to link to you instead.
Another key point, it is important to understand what keywords drive the most traffic, and how to combine them. Especially to the right relevant content, will drive a website’s content SEO relevance, and traffic to it as a consequence. However, Search Engines punish websites that overload their content with keywords.
Use Keyword Research Tools
It’s important to realize, that Search Engine algorithms take a number of factors into account. While deciding which web page should be shown in the first place, second place, etc.
Therefore, optimizing your website for search engines will give you an advantage over non-optimized sites. And also, you’ll increase your chances to rank higher. Remember that text included in images cannot be crawled by spiders. Although alternative text associated with the images is.
Related Post: Keyword Tool | #1 free Google Keyword Planner alternative
So, you may wish to revisit the design of some of your pages. A useful free tool for identifying your keywords is the Keyword Tool or even Google AdWords Keyword Tool. These tools are designed to help prospective advertisers identify the most relevant Keywords Search for their chosen market, but it is also very helpful when writing copy for your website.
Once you have identified your keywords, you must ensure that they appear in the body of your pages. As well as in the metadata of your page, which is the unseen data that gives the spiders key information about your page. This can either be done by yourself, with a little knowledge of HTML and access to your server, or it can be done by your web designer.
Utilize Website SEO Plugins
A WordPress Plugin such as Yoast SEO is one of the most popular SEO plugins on the market today. Whereby, it helps you create an automatically updated XML sitemap for your website.
In addition to that, it helps you preview your content’s search snippet so you can see what site visitors see. And even gives you the green light when your content is SEO optimized. You can add meta tags, set canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content and Google penalties, and integrate with Google Search Console.
So that in the end, you can see how search engines are indexing your site and fix any crawl errors that exist. You can read and learn more about Yoast SEO: The #1 WordPress SEO Plugin. Equally important, WordPress is well known for being Search Engine Optimization friendly “out of the box.” Even so, with thousands of WordPress Search Engine Optimization plugins to choose from.
In fact, a few additions to your blog may be all that you need in order to reach the next level. And, as you search available WordPress plugins, you’ll be surprised to find just how many are devoted to SEO-related tasks. From WordPress SEO by Toast to XML sitemap, know that there are WordPress Plugins that can help get you there.
The Best SEO Plugins Include:
- All-in-One SEO Pack
- Google XML Sitemaps
- Broken Link Checker
- Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
- W3 Total Cache
- All In One WP Security & Firewall
- WPtouch Mobile Plugin
- Yet Another Related Post-Plugin (YARPP)
- Seo Optimized Images
- Squirrly SEO
- SEOPress
- Rank Math
While it’s a good business practice to learn more about each WordPress SEO plugin at your disposal. However, you don’t want to bog yourself down with too many. To protect against this, get started by considering a collection of WordPress Themes that can help in your site design and SEO Structuring along with the other plugins detailed above.
What Should You Look For In An SEO Plugin?
A decent SEO plugin should help you generate meta tags and descriptions based on your chosen keywords. Some of the candidates in this list also provide content analysis with actionable tips for improvement. Furthermore, it’s crucial to create XML sitemaps so that search engine crawlers can index your site. Any good SEO plugin should be able to handle both.
But, someplace more of an emphasis on one group than the other. For example, Yoast SEO Plugin includes a simple startup guide and notifications, whereas some other Website Plugins just throw you straight to the wolves. Therefore, when it comes to the best SEO plugins like the All In One SEO (AIOSEO) Plugin, there are different users that they’ll all need to cater to.
Consider the following:
- Newbies who just want an easy way to boost their site in Google. If that’s you, congrats! You’re making a great decision.
- The Pros want to do things like automatically format meta-information on custom field variables and all that jazz.
So when you choose your SEO plugin, make sure to go with one that approaches SEO in a way that fits your situation. By the same token, if you’re running WooCommerce or something else with custom post types, you’ll need to make sure that the plugin supports that too.
Takeaway,
We all know that Search Results can always be better. And that’s why Google engineers spend every day testing it, conducting hundreds of thousands of experiments every year, resulting in thousands of improvements.
Every time you search, there are thousands, sometimes millions, of web pages with helpful information. How Google figures out which results to show starts long before you even type, and is guided by a commitment to you to provide the best information.
Even before you search, Google organizes information about web pages in its search index. The index is like a library, except it contains more info than in all the world’s libraries put together. In a fraction of a second, Google’s Search algorithms sort through hundreds of billions of web pages in their Search index.
This helps to find the most relevant, useful results for what you’re looking for. In order to determine the PageRank of your site, you can download a browser plugin such as Open SEO Stats (Formerly: Page Rank Status) for the Google Chrome browser.
Related Topics:
- Alexa Rank Math Plugin
- What Are Nofollow Links?
- How Google Search Works
- How to Improve Your Site Ranking
- Why Plagiarism-Free Content Matters In SEO
Finally, I hope the above-revised guide on SEO was helpful to you. But if you’ll have more questions, contributions, and even research suggestions you’d like to share with our readers, please Consult Us and let us know.
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