In the Cyber Era, it’s hard to imagine life without the internet. We need it both as individuals and for our businesses. Shut it down, and the universe stops. That’s how powerful the internet is.
The internet has fuelled a lot of technological advancement. This includes the Internet of Things, websites and many other developments dominating our lives today. We’re going to focus on how entrepreneurs can use this technology and, more specifically, website ranking as facilitated by SEO techniques. Having a website is good, but it’s nothing if it cannot reach the people you want to see it.
That’s why knowledge of the Search Engine Optimization should be your number one priority in this tech-age. You’ve probably made inquiries into SEO and read dozens of explanations as you tried to make headway. But here are five points you should be conversant with if you want to make the best of SEO.
On-site Optimization
Search engines want to categorize your page, and determine where it should feature when a search occurs. Therefore the quality of your page, or the content, helps your bid to have your site rank on top of the search engines. When making content, include the keywords that will make search engines pick your website.
Remember these simple rules to improve on-site optimization: Include keywords in your title (1 to 2 words), and the fields (5 to 7 words). The keywords should be keyword phrases rather than just single words. By including the keyword in the headings, it gives the search engines a tip-off to the structure and content of your article. If you run into difficulty with knowing the right keywords for the area, you can always run to Google Adwords or the Google Trends keyword tools for help.
But don’t overdo it! Let keywords flow naturally and in context. You may run the risk of being un-indexed if you stuff too many in, thereby making it difficult for your article to rank at all.
In short, on-site optimization makes your website achieve acceptance by search engines, and then viewers.
Off-site optimization
Now you have an eye-catching article with the right keyword. Search engines will still need to be convinced to rank your pages on to,p and this time they look at the site's authority. A site is considered authoritative or ‘most important’ depending on the number of other sites linked to it.
In other words, off-site optimization is the other part of SEO where external methods come into play. Google started this clever way of determining website authoritativeness to curb abuse of on-site optimization. If you have great content on your site, many other sites will link to it and improve the authority. To understand the importance of linking, think about it in the same way with referrals. If you offer excellent services, people will refer their friends to you. So, if many links are coming to your website, the higher the trust levels, the higher the authority.
Off-site optimization carries around 75% of the SEO factor. You can read further on this topic by reading this article at seo-hacker.com
White-hat SEO
White-hat SEO is the ethical SEO whereby the website is ranked organically depending on its relevancy. Here optimization strategies, techniques, and tactics focus on the quality the consumers are about to get. White-hat SEO follows the search engines rules and regulations strictly.
Some of the techniques used are keywords, keyword analysis, link building, and back linking to improve the link popularity and performance at the search engine results pages (SERP).
Many factors are put into consideration when factoring white-hat. This includes the written content, images and video, meta information, site architecture, and site performance. The information is of value to the audience; there's no abuse of intellectual rights, no spamming of the keywords and many other flaws are not in place.
Quality should be the driver of traffic to your site, but sometimes this is not the case. Read more on White-hat SEO by following this link.
Black-hat SEO
Black-hat SEO is the use of illegal means to achieve better ranking for the website. The person using black-hat intends to achieve a high ranking, but has little consideration of the value the user gets. Rules are broken to outsmart search engines.
There are several techniques used including paid links, spam comments, duplicate content, article spinning, cloaking and several others.
This method is risky and could get your site banned from the search engine results pages. Therefore, it is not worth it. Follow this link for more on this topic.
Page Speed
Google has confirmed that it values page speed when ranking pages. This is because the longer the page takes to load, the less favourable it becomes to users. According to Kissmetrics.com, 47% of the users expect the pages to load faster, while 40 % will leave the pages if it does not load in 3 seconds.
Google has incorporated this into its algorithms to rank pages. Also, slow pages lead to search engine crawling few pages, adversely affecting allocated crawl budget, and is therefore another reason for the lower ranking.
You can check your site speed and improve the experience by following this link. There are several ways in which you can improve your site speed:
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Optimize images. Make sure images are not larger than they are supposed to be, and they are in the right file format.
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Improve server response time.
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Reduce redirects. When the redirect happens, your visitor is forced to wait longer for HTTP request cycle to complete.
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Get a complete list of how to improve page speed as compiled by moz.com.
As we sign off, let us remind you the following:
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On-site optimization and its counterpart off-site optimization is what will get you on the first page of the search engines. Your SEO effort will be futile if you do not approach this part of optimization seriously.
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White-hat SEO is more expensive and takes longer to achieve, but it is long-term and has the best use of the internet resources which are valuable to the consumer.
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Black-hat SEO is illegal, cheap, and goes against search engines and the internet's best practices. Your website is at risk of getting blocked or suspended if uses this malpractice. You will only achieve temporary results, but the consequences are dire if found to have indulged in this form of SEO.
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Your visibility online is important as an entrepreneur. SEO techniques will help you achieve that by improving your website ranking and therefore it will be easier for your business to increase the number of customers.
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Page speed is important for SEO. The slower the page, the lower it ranks and the more it becomes difficult for your target audience to find it.
With all these tips in mind, go and do your best to tackle SEO from an informed point of view, and see traffic grow on your site and make your business expand.
Help other entrepreneurs avoid SEO mistakes by sharing this article. Let other freelancers know your position on Black-hat SEO, and why they should avoid it altogether. Use the comment section below to share your thoughts!