SEO or search engine optimization is something that anyone who has a website needs to be aware of. Having a good SEO strategy will help you rank in the search results. To create your SEO strategy, there are certain SEO basics that you need to know about which are important to your success.
Relevancy
When search engines look at websites, they are looking for the pages that will be most relevant to what their users are looking for. The algorithms that the search engines use are secret, but everyone knows that providing relevant information to users will help you rank. This means that you should be looking at answering the questions that the search engine user is going to be asking.
An example of this will be someone who has a dog training website. They may want to rank for the search term ‘how to crate train a puppy’. However, if they do not have any information on their website that deals with crate training a puppy, they are not going to rank for the search term.
The Quality Of Your Content
The quality of your content is vital to success in SEO. There is no point in churning out multiple posts per week if none of them are providing the reader with valuable information. When looking at quality, you also need to consider if you are writing for people or for the search engine. Writing for the search engine was something that helped you rank in the past, but now you need to ensure that you are writing for your visitors.
Long-form content is increasing in popularity because it is able to better address the needs of the reader. You need to stop worrying about how many times a keyword needs to appear in the content and focus on the user experience. If the user experience of your content is good, the search engines will take note of this and rank you accordingly.
Focus On User Experience
User experience is not only about how the visitor interacts and understands your content. Your entire website should be focused on bettering the user experience. SEO services is about more than just your content as ranking algorithms will look at the speed of your website and how easily it can be navigated by human users.
When you focus on the user experience, you need to ensure that navigation is clear and users will be able to find what they are looking for. Hiding menus in obscure places will not help you with SEO and you need to ensure that all of your navigation links work. You should also have an easy way for people to navigate back to your homepage.
The speed of your website is also very important and you need to take steps to increase this. If you have large images or a lot of flash on your website, it will take longer to load. The longer a website takes to load the more likely your visitors are going to leave and the search engines will not rank you as highly.