Editor’s note: This post is a guest post by Glen Dimaandal, SEO expert and entrepreneur.
Of all the commodities in the world of online business, search engine traffic is arguably the most precious. Search engines drive targeted and highly motivated visits to the pages of websites. This kind of traffic is more receptive to marketing messages and therefore easier to convert into paying customers. It’s no wonder why companies big and small are always trying to jostle for a good position atop Google’s search results., The ones who manage to get on top have the distinct advantage of being considered by potential customers ahead of everyone else.
Of course, getting to the top is easier to talk about than to actually pull off. Webmasters with goals of increasing their search visibility employ a process called search engine optimization (SEO) to try and outrank their competitor’s pages. This involves refining the website’s technical performance, enhancing its content portfolio, receiving citations from external pages and more. If successful, an SEO campaign can propel a site’s pages to the top of search results pages, allowing it to attract more clicks at no cost on a daily basis.
A lot of medium to large enterprises recognize the value of search visibility and regard it as a core part of their marketing programs. Companies who can have considerable resources can either form internal teams or hire SEO agencies. That’s not to say that smaller organizations will have to live in search obscurity. SEO is relatively easy to learn and can be applied to a website through a DIY project.
If you’re not quite ready to pay for SEO services just yet, this post is for you. In this article, we’ll discuss how you can apply some powerful fundamental optimization techniques that can help your website attract significantly more traffic from search engines than ever before. Here we go:
Knowing what terms your target customers use to find businesses, products and services like yours is a crucial first step in getting found on the web. You don’t want to be the online store that calls athletic footwear rubber shoes when your customers constantly look for sneakers. You also don’t want to be the company that labels itself as a web design studio when all your potential customers refer to companies like yours as web design agencies.
To check whether you’re using the best terms on your webpages, use the free Google Keyword Planner tool. This online app provides you estimates on how many searches happen per month for a particular term globally or within specific countries. Keyword Planner can also provide you with keyword ideas that you can use to expand your portfolio of search terms to optimize for.
Alternatively, you can also use paid tools such as SEMRush and Wordstream. Personally, I find their search volume estimates to be more accurate, but for starters Google Keyword Planner will work just fine.
The robots.txt file is a small text document that exists in most websites for the purpose of telling search engines which pages they can crawl and which ones are off limits. Checking how this file has been written and making sure it follows best practices can make a big difference in your site’s overall search engine visibility.
To check your robots.txt file, go to www.example.com/robotss.txt. In this case, just replace example with the domain name of your site. You should see something similar to what’s on the screenshot below:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
While you’ll want bots to crawl most of your site’s pages, there are some exceptions. These include:
One of the best ways to optimize your site for search is to gain some insights on how it’s being viewed by Google. Fortunately, Google is willing to share some of the data it has about your site using a platform called Search Console. This is an online service that lets you claim ownership of a website in Google’s eyes. When you do, you’ll be granted access to special reports and functionalities that you won’t get anywhere else.
With Search Console, you’ll receive access to the following SEO-related data:
You’ll also receive special functions such as tools that let you disavow links, submit sitemaps, remove pages from the index and many more. Search Console is a treasure trove of useful information and it helps train you on a lot of basic SEO principles. You can get started on it by following the instructions here.
XML sitemaps are optional but important facet of SEO. This document lists all the public-facing pages of your website and information on when it went live, how often it’s updated and what its place is within your information architecture. That data allows search engines to discover pages more easily and crawl your site more efficiently.
You don’t have to know how to write XML files to use this on your site. Most CMS platforms like WordPress have plugins that automatically generate sitemaps. All you need to do after installing and configuring the plugin is to generate the file and check it using your browser. Often, the sitemap can be found in www.example.com/sitemap.xml. This could vary depending on how your plugin works. Fortunately, that same plugin should tell you how to find the sitemap right after you generate it. It should look something like this:
This was generated by the Yoast SEO plugin, which explains why it looks rather neat. However, having a sitemap that has a more codey look is also valid. Other plugins for non-WordPress platforms are known to do that. Google will understand both if the XML writing is up to spec.
While having an XML sitemap is a good thing, it’s not all there is to leveraging its power for SEO. You also need to make sure search engines are aware of the sitemap by submitting it to their site doagnostic services. To do this, you need to set up a Google Search Console account for your site. Once it’s up and running, you can go to Crawl>XML Sitemaps and click on the Add/Test Sitemap button on the upper right. Data will not be immediately available, but you should see something like this after several days:
This data allows you to see how many pages listed in the sitemap are being indexed. If it isn’t all the pages, there may be a need to review the ones that aren’t being included in the SERPs. Oftentimes, technical issues, content duplication or low content quality are the culprits for non-inclusion.
In the past few years, the speed at which your site’s pages load has become an increasingly significant ranking factor on Google. In very competitive niches, site speed can spell the difference between being on Google’s first page for your target keywords and being on the outside looking in. Fortunately, Google has provided a great tool to check your site’s current speed and what you can do to improve it. All you need to do is visit Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool and enter the IRL of the page you want to check:
After hitting enter, the tool will analyze your page. It will then grade the pageon a scale of 0-100. A score of 85 or better is the ideal mark. Good thing the tool also gives you recommendations on what you can possibly fix to speed up load times.
In the example above, we can see that the site needs a little more work to hit that sweet 85 mark on desktop devices. It also requires significant touches to optimize its mobile site speed.
In 2015, queries from mobile devices finally overtook those made from desktop computers in terms of sheer volume. Since then, Google has considered itself to be a mobile-first company and emphasized the value of making your pages mobile-friendly. To double down on that, the search giant officially made mobile-friendliness a ranking factor for the mobile version of its SERPs.
A mobile-friendly design pertains to the ability of your website to scale down to smaller screens without losing readability and design integrity. Text should stay large enough to be read without having users zooming in. The same goes for menus, images and other on-screen objects. They can’t end up all over a mobile site’s display when being viewed on tablet and phone screens.
To check if your site is mobile-friendly, use Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool. Similar to the site speed tool, you just need to enter the URL of a page and hit Enter.
You should see something like the message and display in the screenshot above. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you may have to talk to your web design and development team. The immediacy of going mobile-friendly will depend on your target audience’s behavior and preferences. More B2B-type of sites tend to be less dependent on mobile traffic, making this item lower on their priority lists. However , ecommerce sites, blogs and affiliate sites usually benefit tremendously from the ability to deliver content to their visitors while they’re on the go.
Fortunately, most CMS platforms have themes that are mobile-friendly out of the box. Most modern WordPress themes were developed with phone screens in mind. A lot of eCommerce platforms such as Shopify and BigCommerce also make it a point to be mobile-friendly.
A couple of years ago, Google also confirmed that using secure (HTTPS) URLs will provide your pages with an incremental ranking advantage. Google cites data integrity as the main reason for rewarding this use of this protocol. More secure sites are able to deliver user experiences that are harder for third parties to compromise. User information also tends to be more secure when they transact or sign in with secure sites.
If you already have an existing site, switching to HTTPS will require some effort. However, it’s a worthwhile investment since you’ll gain better search visibility and your users will feel more confident in sharing their details with you. In time, the added traffic and the quality of user engagement you receive will pay for the costs of making the upgrade to HTTPS.
Some people tend to make on-page SEO sound like this complicated craft that you need professional help for, but it’s really just a matter of knowing which elements in a typical page affects its rankings and knowing the best practices to optimize it.
When you’re trying to help a page rank better here are the things you need to look at:
Search engines use the slugs of URLs as clues on the page’s context. As such, your URL slugs should be written in real words like the first example instead of random alphanumeric strings as shown in the second example. Make it a point to mention your main target keyword in the slug and eliminate “stop words” such as the, a, and, with and other non-essentials. URL slugs need to be as short as possible while still providing humans and search engines an inkling of what to expect on the page.
Each page in your site needs a title tag. Even those that won’t be open for search engine crawling need to have this element for the sake of proper labeling.
The better your meta descriptions are, the more clicks you’ll get for your listings. This may also help improve your overall search rankings as click-through rates are now believed to be important ranking signals for Google.
Sub-headlines formatted with H2, H3 and other tiers of headline text are also important to properly format. However, they don’t influence search rankings nearly as much as H1 does.
As much as possible, add alt text to all images found on your public-facinmg pages. With images that you use in your site’s back end or in restricted pages, the addition of this element is optional.
These days, it’s widely accepted that long-form content pieces which comprehensively discuss a topic tend to perform better on Google. While this may be the case, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should force yourself or your writers to lengthen your content for the sake of SEO. The important thing is to satisfy the intent of your visitors and to deliver experiences that they’ll find fulfilling.
In the past several years, Google has made a big push towards making search results more in tune with a searcher’s immediate location. This is evidence by the prominent display of three-pack Google My Business results as well as traditional search results that are more location-specific. If your business targets a city, a state/province or even a country other than the US, local SEO should be placed high on your list of priorities.
While there’s a lot that goes into Local SEO, you can focus on the following areas to get started:
In the late 90s, Google revolutionized how search engines determined top results by introducing its PageRank algorithm. Named after Google co-founder Larry Page, this system determined the authority and popularity of websites using the quantity and quality of links pointing to them from other sites. The better a site was at attracting links, the greater its ranking power grew.
These days, Google has otten much better at discerning the quality and legitimacy of inbound links to a site. However, links are still the strongest ranking factor on Google by far. If you want to be competitive in the search rankings for your target keywords, you need to get some links pointing your pages’ way.
Attracting links to your site is a fine art and it’s a topic that we can write an entire book about. However, you the following strategies have been known to be very effective in getting some link love from other sites:
Link building may be too work-intensive for some folks. In cases like these, you can look for qualified link building service providers. Some firms specialize only in this aspect of SEO and are able to acquire link placements for you at a cost that’s significantly less than what you’d spend if you try to grind it out yourself.
Overall, SEO is a pretty broad topic that requires a lot of study if you want to gain high-level knowledge on all its facets. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get significant results just by applying the fundamentals. Start with these 10 items and you should be able to gain some headway in your quest for organic traffic growth.
Glen Dimaandal is the founder and CEO of the GDI SEO Service Company, a search marketing agency based in the Philippines. He is a former international SEO consultant at Fortune 500 corporations and is now a full-time entrepreneur.