Search engines like Google get millions of searches by users every day. This traffic is beneficial to businesses because it is high-intent traffic.
Being visible to these prospects leaves you an opportunity to connect with them, discover their problem, solve the problem, and earn their trust. This is where SEO comes in, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), in basic terms, means optimizing your website to ensure it ranks high on search engine result pages.
While it may sound complicated, there are basic guidelines to help you drive the right traffic to your website. On that note, here is a comprehensive guide to the basics of search engine optimization!
Crawl Accessibility
Your website has to be “crawlable” to be able to show up on search engine results pages (SERPs)
Search engine bots crawl websites to read their contents and match them with user search intents. The matching process is called indexing.
After indexing, the pages are ranked according to the most relevant results, depending on user search intent. Using the robots.txt file in the root directory of websites will help you suggest to search engine bots the relevant pages they should crawl.
Alternatively, Online Marketing Gurus can help you troubleshoot more about why your website is not being ranked and help you fix it.
Keyword Research
Keywords are important elements in SEO— They’re the words that make up a user’s search query. Knowing the keywords related to your business is essential, as it helps you create relevant content to match users’ queries.
Keyword research is vital because by paying attention to your audience and discovering what they want, you can match it to keyword data. By doing this, you’ll have a list of relevant keywords for your business, and your keyword targeting will be more meaningful than random, high-volume keywords.
One tip to remember is to be wary of stuffing your content with too many keywords. Instead of ranking high, search engines might do the opposite and de-rank your page.
If you are located in Singapore, hiring a professional SEO agency to help you with keyword research is a worthwhile investment, as there are many trusted experts you can rely on. When looking for the best SEO agency in Singapore make sure to find one that fits your business needs and has a good track record. Check their customer reviews and website rankings before making your decision.
Content Optimization
Your content is one of the ingredients for SEO success. Content matters in SEO because that’s where you implement your keywords to target and match with the user’s intent.
Your content needs to be unique, rich with information, and follow formatting guidelines to ensure that your page is well-optimized for search engines.
Other elements like images, alt text, meta description, headings, etc., must be appropriately optimized to add more quality and appeal to users and search engines alike.
Information Architecture
Information architecture is how you structure your web pages and interlink them to improve SERP ranking and make them more accessible to users.
Links help a page to be better understood and gain more relevance. When linking, it is advised to use descriptive text, to help search engines understand what the page is all about.
A good tip is to attach links to keywords— usually called anchor text— but be careful about putting too many keywords to the linking text.
Link Building
Having a crawlable website, publishing great content with relevant keywords, and structuring information is not enough to rank high.
Outranking your competitors means that you have to establish authority in your niche. You can do this by authoritative websites backlinking to you, building a reputable brand, and an engaged audience to share your content.
Some great ways to build backlinks are;
- Creating unique resources— high-quality content.
- Using customer/partner links.
- Have a blog section on your website.
- Refurbishing old content and publishing on other platforms (e.g., Quora, Reddit, Twitter) to widen your audience reach beyond Google.
- Earning press attention.
