There’s something wonderful about having an online business. I think part of it stems from the fact that if you sell something at a store your own, you can only sell it to people who pass by your specific area in the world, yet if you sell something online you can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection. Getting those people on the site and interested in closing a deal is one of the largest and earliest hurdles a webmaster will face.
Schools of thought for obtaining a vast audience of engaged users can vary, yet SEO is commonly said to reign supreme. Strategically ranking high on search engine results to make sure people who are actually interested in your content will see your website right away. This is referred to as organic search traffic and of all types of visitors they are some of the most likely to convert since they are explicitly looking for what you’re offering.
SEO is advanced and constantly changing, as evidenced by the fact that large agencies who focus solely on SEO related tasks for client websites are plentiful online. The average person can still get a good understanding of what works and what doesn’t, some people can see the game for what it is. A search engine’s algorithm is trying to figure out how to find results most relevant to the user’s query while still not being so predictable and easy to exploit that bad websites can sneak through. Using the data they collect, this means a highly ranked site typically reads well to both robots and human beings.
So how do you best accomplish that? These are the cornerstones of all well thought out SEO strategies:
Easy To Navigate Site Architecture
It should be as simple as possible to understand and navigate your website. Whatever the user is searching for needs to be addressed immediately. If upon immediate inspection you aren’t touching on why they came to your website there’s a good chance they’ll return to their search results and see if the next option on the list answers their question.
Once you’ve got their attention, they should be able to easily navigate to new web pages and if at all possible funnelled into other content on your website, whether it is money content or otherwise. People coming to your site and staying on it is something most search engines love to see, it means your site is worth being on. Confusing websites aren’t often worth being on, don’t have a confusing or vague website.
Optimize The Little Things
Like a mechanic finely tuning a performance vehicle, finely tuning your website will help you cross the finish line first. Tweak your website to squeeze all of the speed and performance you can out of every single aspect of your site. The article “Getting Started from the Beginning: What is SEO?“ from Bear Fox Marketing gives a great rundown on the key components of SEO, such as quality backlinks, dynamic content, and the importance of a mobile-first approach. Some SEO concepts are fairly abstract and can mean a few things, but there’s odds and ends that are really simple to optimize and 100% black or white.
One such example is site speed. All the data you store & serve on your website needs to load as quickly as possible, site speed and other easily measurable statistics are known to factor into rankings. Look over all of the moving parts of your website and trim the fat wherever possible, whether it be by displaying images in a more efficient manner or fixing compatibility issues. In the end, it all adds up in an industry where the best take advantage of each and every little thing they can.
Build Relevant, High Quality Links
Having links to your website shows search engines that people like your content enough to link off of their website and onto yours. Essentially, websites linking to yours give your website a lot more credibility in the eyes of the search engine. Not all links are created equal, with spam and malicious websites linking to yours being much less valuable if not downright harmful compared to a respected publication that has a lot of organic traffic.
Google for instance knows the difference between a link from a high authority website and a site that was made the day before. Red flags go up when none of the websites that link to yours are even remotely related to your niche or aren’t particularly trustworthy. What this means is that you need to cultivate relationships with other site owners in your niche and figure out mutually beneficial ways to link to one another.
Guest posts come to mind as a way to have active and legitimate blogs in your niche talking about you. There are services to help you facilitate the guest post process or you can email webmasters directly to see what kind of opportunities are there. Gone are the days of PBNs when it was about quantity, these days quality reign supreme.
If I was to describe a site with well implemented SEO as briefly as possible, I’d have to say it’s a website that focuses on being a fantastic, genuinely useful website. Site owners who approach the concept of SEO from a purely mechanical and corporate point of view are missing a lot of opportunities that are capitalizing on by the site owners who understand SEO is about having a quality website. There are trends of course when it comes to sites people like more than others, so it is vital to study those trends but understand why those trends are there in the first place.
Consider most SEO tips: they often involve making the site easier to use, always suggest that your site adds value and be legitimate, and in general can boil down to “make your site more desirable.”
You’ve probably used the internet for some time yourself. Try and use your website as if you were a visitor and aggressively try to rip your site a new one. If you manage to uncover any serious problems like slow load times or a broken navigation system, you now know what to focus your attention on. Good SEO means making good websites.