As a digital marketing consultant, I often find myself spending time on some online forums populated by freelancers, entrepreneurs and small business owners. In such online communities, there’s usually a trend in how they talk about SEO saying that it’s too fluid, always changing and basically hard to keep up with. I find this to be a misleading attitude that can lead people to view SEO as something complex, intimidating and overwhelming, which has the end result of keeping them uninformed about it. Search Engine Optimization is one of the areas I specialize in and while it’s true that the SEO landscape is ever-evolving and developing, certain fundamentals still remain the same.
SEO’S Unchanging Ranking Fundamentals
Over the years, search engines like Google change and refine their algorithms in a bid to provide searchers with quick and relevant information while SEO professionals strive to come up with new tactics to grow traffic and optimize websites for better rankings. Nonetheless, some baseline concepts you need to understand and apply SEO have remained unchanged. These SEO basics can be narrowed down to 4:
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Website Search Bot Crawlability
You might have the best content in the world but if search engines can’t find it, it might as well be useless. In order to drive traffic to your site, you need to ensure that search engines can access and read your content- especially the pages you want to rank highly.
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Website Structure For SEO
In addition to making your site crawlable, you also need to make it easier for search engines to find and prioritize your content. You might think that all pages on your site have equal importance but they don’t. You need some sort of hierarchy to show search engines which ones to rank. So figure out the most important pages and build the rest around them.
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White Hat Keywords Strategies
Most people are familiar with keywords as they’re crucial in letting search engines know what your content is all about. This helps them connect your content to relevant search queries and send traffic your way. Some years ago, keyword stuffing -using keywords over and over again- was common. However, this practice made for poor user experience and fell off after Google stopped ranking such pages. What works now is targeting one primary keyword and naturally writing content that uses terminology that’s familiar to your target audience.
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High Quality White Hat Backlinks Earned
Backlinks can be considered the SEO version of reviews. Getting lots of links back to your content is a good thing, as long as they’re from high-quality sites. This shows search engines that you’re a trustworthy, authoritative source, making your content rank higher. SEO is just one of the many digital marketing services I offer. Get in touch with me today and let’s see how we can work together to make your business more successful.