Search Engine Optimization
In a World where searching plays an important role in online experiences, ranking well on search engines is fundamental. All major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo have primary search results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users.
Now, we come to the point that a strong SEO strategy makes it possible to start the ball rolling and get a lot of exposure. Sure, everyone knows that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, but the main point here is to elaborate on what gets optimized. According to Neil Patel, a top influencer on the Web[1], “SEO is the process of optimizing your online content, so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword”.
SEO factors such as design, links and the quality of content may lead to search engine rankings but of course they work in combination to make your website outstanding. There are some important “ranking factors” that can lead to success with both search engines and searchers. We put them into two categories, on-the-page factors and off-the-page factors[2]. On-the-page factors are elements in the direct control of the publisher where off-the-page factors are the ones influenced by readers, visitors and other publishers. Needless to say, the presence of negative factors can harm your chances of achieving SEO success.
Here, we demonstrate how to show up first in the search page results applying these elements on your web page in the following figures.
figure 1: On-the-page factors
Content: There is a well-known phrase in this regard made by Bill Gates that “Content is King”. In 1996, he predicted that producing great content is the key to SEO success.
In addition to creating good content, you should discover the specific ways that people may be searching for your content. Therefore, good keyword research factor is another way of getting your page ranked highly.
Previously, the use of keyword was to use a lot of words, even irrelevant ones such as names of cities, countries and redundant information. It is obviously not a tactic you want to employ in search of long term rankings[3]. In recent years, the use of keyword is more about semantics, which means search engines, especially Google, have gotten improved on interpreting the meaning of the keyword searches.
Fresh content is vital to attract search engine traffic. Moreover, while searching on the Internet, you may encounter a section in the results where Google answers a question directly. Sites used as direct answer sources are considered reliable and indeed send traffic.
HTML
Title tags: Similar to newspaper headlines, search engines use title tag to understand what a page is about. It is essential to use at least one h1 tag to make the title clear to them.
Meta description: A meta description that contains the keywords searched for may catch the user’s eye[4]. It is considered as a success factor.
Schema: It is a specific vocabulary of tags (or microdata) that you can add to your HTML to improve the way your page is represented in SERPs. Moz[5] has some good tips on how to get the most out of Schema.
Headers: Header tags are used to identify the key sections of a webpage. Header tags are as much for making content easy to read for users as it is for search engines.
Site Architecture
Crawl: The search engine crawls websites to identify whether they are a good result or not. It adds the websites which were crawled to the big book called ‘index’ and when a user searches a topic, they go through their lists and pick out the very best ones to show first[6].
Duplicate: As Neil Patel mentioned on his web site, ‘Re-posting your content on other websites, or publishing your guest posts again on your own site, doesn’t hurt your SEO, unless you do it the wrong (spammy) way.’ Actually, Google takes all the duplicates and groups them into a cluster. Then Google will show the best of the results in that cluster[7].
Mobile friendliness: Designing a responsive website is essential these days since users tend to use different devices such as mobile phones and tablets to search. So getting your website mobile friendly it has a chance of better rankings.
Speed: These days, no one is patient enough to wait for a web page to load, so speed up your site, which can also affect other factors.
URL: It is better to select the words you want to be indexed for within your domain name. However, it is not a major factor regarding better ranking.
HTTPS: It is worth considering since Google announced that security is regarded as a ranking signal. It would like to provide better security to web surfers.
Trust: A success of SEO depends greatly on the site trust from a search perspective. There are four steps to build trust including Authority, Engage, History and Identity.
Authority: It is an essential ranking factor that helps send trust signals to Google. According to Moz, “Page Authority is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a specific page will rank on search engines. It is based on data from the Mozscape web index and includes link counts, MozRank, MozTrust, and dozens of other factors.”
Engagement: The amount of time users spend time going through different parts of a website, reading contents and clicking on the links is considered as a ranking element.
Identity: Search engines tend to verify web sites as well as their authors and it is indeed a huge trust signal for them.
Links: As the first major “Off-The-Page” ranking factor used by search engines, links play a big role in whether a site will succeed or fail. While trying to get backlinks, take these factors into consideration:
Quality: Search engines count all the links pointing at websites (except those blocked using nofollow or other methods), but they don’t count them all equally. They give more weight to the links that are considered to be of better quality[8].
Anchor text: Link text or anchor text should be written in a natural way which means that when you decide to add a link, try to use words which describe it instead of linking the word ‘click here’, for example.
Numbers: The more websites link to you results in a great leap forward for search engines. However, you should bear in mind that it is necessary to avoid automated software and spamming blogs.
Personal: Recently, links have lost their importance due to some reasons such as links getting bought and sold. Thus, social signals appear to be an important external signal for search rankings.
Location: All searchers are shown results relevant to the country and city they’re in. Going beyond borders in order to reach new audience, you have to work on your international SEO. If you want to appear on specific search results in an area, make sure that your website is relevant to that city, for example.
History: Past results that users clicked on as well as past websites they visited are taken into accounts when it comes to the personal history. However, tracking such individual actions is difficult, therefore, optimizing on-the-page-factors is of great value.
Socialization: There is a newer factor that has a great impact on search results which is regarded as social connections. Actions made on different social Networks indicate preference towards certain companies and brands. Therefore, search engines bring up the results relevant to them.
Social: Last but not least, social factors which can help your website rank better. We can refer to it as a form of building link, as well. It should be noted that there are many fake accounts on a social network. Thus, you need to strive to gain references from social networks with good reputations.
References
[1] http://neilpatel.com/what-is-seo/
[2] http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo
[3] http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/how-to-write-seo-friendly-website-content-for-google/
[4] http://searchengineland.com/guide/seo/html-code-search-engine-ranking
[5] https://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data
[6] http://searchengineland.com/guide/seo/site-architecture-search-engine-ranking
[7] http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-25-30-of-the-webs-content-is-duplicate-content-thats-okay-180063
[8] http://searchengineland.com/guide/seo/link-building-ranking-search-engines
SEO needs your regular attention to look on the improvements. You cannot put up things and just wait for results, here, we introduce five SEO tactics you need to know to drive quality traffic, get visibility and boost your brand.
One of the most important elements for SEO is title tags since they appear in three key places: browsers, search engine results and external websites. So, these tips should be considered to improve title tags:
In the last two years, Conversion Rate Optimization is getting more popular with regard to high-ranking. It is a system that engages visitors and provides an opportunity for websites to receive desired feedbacks.
Users tend to spend more time on their cell phones and therefore using various mobile applications has been dramatically increased. As a result, app store optimization becomes essential in order to improve visibility and soar to the top ranking.
There is a new trend in online experiences which is an increasing number of people rely on voice searches to get results more quickly. For example, instead of typing “who is the founder of Apple?”, it is easier to say “Apple founder”. Not surprisingly, voice search has become widespread as Microsoft, Google, and Apple launching their own versions of advanced voice-responsive assistants – Cortana, Google Now and Siri. Therefore, make sure that your content is easily searchable through voice searches by using long-tail keywords, which are more likely to be spoken than conventional keywords.
Avoid copying content from different sources and place them in your website because your rankings will drop as Google declared that it will panelize websites which publish content copies. You can gain benefit from enhancing your content and attempt to offer unique and relevant content to rise the rank to the top of search engine results.
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/top-10-seo-trends-2016-gaurav-kumar
