Search engine optimization (SEO) is a way of enhancing your website for search engines, like Google and Bing, in a way that clearly communicates the message of your content. Without it, search engines wouldn’t understand what our website content is about, and search results would be a mess of random information. Optimizations to the metadata
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a way of enhancing your website for search engines, like Google and Bing, in a way that clearly communicates the message of your content. Without it, search engines wouldn’t understand what our website content is about, and search results would be a mess of random information. Optimizations to the metadata in a website are considered part of “organic SEO,” meaning they help a website achieve natural placement on a search engine results page (SERP).
Note: Metadata includes keywords that describe the main content, a short description of what a web page is about and keyword enriched headlines and titles.
As websites advance and new design trends develop, it’s important to maintain a resilient SEO plan with strong metadata that accurately explains the purpose of your website. SEO takes time to develop and even more time for search engines to recognize, so getting started when a new website is being created or making enhancements to an existing website as soon as possible is always within best practices.
The bright side of organic SEO is that it costs nothing to maintain since it’s placed within your website’s code and can be easily applied by your webmaster. Abiding by best practices for SEO will enhance the health of your website and help you achieve natural placement among search engine results.
So where should you get started? Whether you’re developing a new website or just making enhancements to a few pages, the following suggestions will help your website maintain the best practices for organic SEO:
Add All Necessary Content to Each Page
The most important part of your website is thorough and complete content
. Each page should have a healthy amount of up-to-date content that’s relevant to the topic of the website and that specific page. A good keyword density
(a healthy balance of keywords) within this content is also important, as it compliments your metadata. It’s recommended that a relevant keyword/phrase appear within your content every 50 words.
It’s also a good idea to segue your content into a call-to-action (CTA). This is an instruction targete
d to your readers, such as “Call Us Now,” that is intendedto prompt an immediate response. A CTA can be placed anywhere as text or within a clickable button. You never want your readers to finish the end of the content on your webpage and not know what to do next. CTA’s are a great solution to this.
Include Unique Metadata on Each Page
As we’ve mentioned, metadata is a webpage’s way of talking to search engines and explaining what a specific page is about. The most important part of metadata is the page title, since it’s the first part of your webpage that is displayed in search results. A dynamic page title should include relevant keywords in the beginning and your company name at the end, if desired.
Often, a website’s homepage will include the business name first since it’s the introduction to the company. As you can see from the image at the right, the company Howland Business Apparel has followed best practices for the titles of their webpages.
Also important to include is a meta description. This is the brief summary that appears beneath a page title in organic search results. Meta descriptions play a big role in getting people to click to your website, since they act as a preview to what your content is about. It’s important to include targeted keywords in your meta description, since any words that a user searches for will be bolded in the search results.
Maintain an Active Social Media Presence
We recently spoke on the importance of an active social media presence and how search engines look highly upon those who are active daily, especially on Google+. Social media is already affecting Google’s SEO rankings, and this will only increase as time goes on. Google+ is becoming more important when it comes to sharing and indexing content to increase exposure, making it the most important social media site to set up and actively maintain.
List Your Business on Google (and Other Website Directories)
When your business is listed in Google Maps and other related sites, your listing gets higher priority on search placement when the keywords entered are accompanied by your city’s name. The more information Google knows about you, the better.
It’s also helpful to submit your website to other popular online directories to take advantage of all possible listing opportunities. Often, basic listings are free while optimized and priority listings can be bought on the listing directories.
Update Your Website Frequently
Continuously updating a “News,” “Events” or “Blog” page of a website helps avoid stale information and keeps your visitors informed. Also, be sure to update any product or company changes that occur, since fresh content can influence your search engine rank. Whenever there are new blog posts added to your site, be sure to share on every social media channel (especially Google+) to increase exposure, potentially driving up traffic and, in turn, increasing rank.
Organic improvements to your website won’t help you climb to the top of the search engine results page overnight, but investing in a knowledgeable SEO specialist can help the long-term health of your website and gradually improve your ranking in search results.
Not ranking high enough in search engine results? Contact us here at Dream Factory for more information on how we can help you can optimize your website for search engine results and take your exposure even further through integrated digital marketing strategies.
