If you have a business website, no doubt you’ve wondered what you can do to encourage more visitors. After all, more visitors means more people looking at your products or services and more potential clients. When it comes to getting more eyes on your website, search engine optimization (SEO) is key. The following will explore some of the ways that search engine optimization can help your business’s website.
What Is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is a series of ever-changing tools and techniques that help your site communicate with search engines. Search engines thrive on giving people the most relevant and useful web pages based on the information they entered into the search box. Search engines want sites that are trustworthy, well-regarded, have a history of happy viewership, and are relevant to what was being searched. Search engine optimization, therefore, involves finding ways to communicate how valuable your site is to various search engines.
Keywords
When including written content on your site, you want to be looking into the keywords that people are searching for that are relevant to your work and content. There are online tools that can help you seek out the best keywords to include based on your target audience. Let’s say, for instance, that you have recipes on your website. Perhaps the keyword recipe is a bit too vague, seeing as there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions (let’s be honest, probably billions) of websites that have recipes—that’s a lot of competition, and some of these sites have been around for ages, so they are seen are more trustworthy by search engines.
Maybe healthy recipes kids love, however, have less competition and better suit your content. Including this phrase two or three times on the page increases the likelihood that a search engine will recommend your site to someone who searches that phrase.
Site Speed
Another thing search engines use to decide whether or not they recommend your site is the speed at which it loads. Not everyone searching has high-speed internet, which means that they’re going to get bored and click away from your site if it’s taking too long to load. Audit how fast your site loads and then consider a tool like a link page speed optimization from WP Siteplan because this can help ensure the people who land on your page are more likely to stay and boost your ranking in search engines.
Domain Authority
Another thing search engines look for is your domain authority—how legitimate and trustworthy you are. The fastest way to boost your domain authority in the eyes of a search engine is by getting other high authority sites to link back to your page. This might involve guest blogging and link back to your site, submitting press releases to online publications, and doing guest podcasts.
The above information should help explain why SEO is critical for your business’s success and a few of the steps you can take to start improving it today. Of course, search engine algorithms are always being tweaked, which means this process will require constant re-evaluation and tweaking on your end as well. The ideal keywords you need will change as trends, and searching habits develop. New standards for speed will be developed. More factors will be included in domain authority calculations. Keep track of how effective your methods are, and always be looking for areas you could improve in.
