A website that no one sees serves no purpose. When you set up a website, it’s with the intention that people will be able to find it and access it. The internet is teeming with millions of sites. It’s an understatement when we say the competition is plentiful. If they want to increase their website’s visibility and improve their search engine ranking, a website owner must be resourceful and smart. It may look like a tough struggle (and it is), but there are ways to climb to the summit.
The right keywords
Users find their way around products and information online by using certain words or phrases. These search terms have a name, and they’re called keywords. What you want is to optimize the use of keywords associated with your website. Having the right keywords on the web will boost your online visibility, in contrast to the site with only general information that will more likely languish in obscurity. Keyword research tools exist to help you.
Be a smart website owner; use them. See the preferences of your potential visitors, explore what they’re looking for before you write-up the content of your site. But, don’t go into extremes and bunch all our keywords together in a heap. It will be obvious to the customer, and even to crawlers and bots, as their algorithms are getting smarter by the year. Instead, use your keywords sparingly, but strategically in the content. They must not be forced down the customer’s throats. And yes, keyword research is a thing (and in some ways almost a science). It’ll help you write relevant and natural-sounding content for your space on the web.
Relevant Title Tags
The idea is simple here: a title and title tag should be unique and easily readable, optimized for search engines as well as people. SEO experts agree: your keywords should be a priority on the title tag. After seamlessly dropping the keywords, follow up with your brand or product name. This increases even further the odds of ranking high in search results, and ranking high means a lot of people will see your website. A relevant title tag abundant with keywords should appear in all your site’s pages.
Quality hosting service
Your site will be resting on web servers. This is called hosting. Hosting is provided to you by hosting services, and choosing a reliable hosting service is imperative in the website’s success. If your budget is somewhat scarce, maybe you should consider shared hosting, which most of the web hosting companies offer.
Unlike dedicated hosting where the client leases an entire server that’s not shared with anyone else, on a shared hosting service many websites with different domain names are located on the same (shared) web server. Dedicated web hosting would be like lodging at a five star hotel, while shared hosting is more akin to a motel experience. It may not be as convenient, but it will also be cheaper. The key is to choose a hosting service that will keep your site up and running at all times and improve your visibility.
Google ranking factors and algorithms
Google is the dominant search engine, and will remain so in the foreseeable future. There are many other search engines, but the truth is – if you’re not on Google, you might as well not exist at all. For this reason, constantly keep an eye on updates from Google’s SEO experts. They will keep you up to date with the latest developments in the world of SEO, and warn you of an outdated practice. Outdated practices may not only be ineffective, but actively hurt your Google ranking. If that happens, you will have nobody but yourself to blame. The many algorithms work tirelessly to rank websites. The ranking factors are compiled into a score. The higher the score, the better your website will fare in the wilderness of the World Wide Web.
Link-building and outreaching
The best way to get noticed is to be associated with the big players. As an owner of a website, you’d want to be in some sort of relationship with authority sites. Don’t hesitate to reach out to them as a content contributor. Every time they mention and link to you on their pages, your site becomes more visible and relevant both to people and web crawlers. This is called link-building or back-linking. The reasoning is simple: if an authoritative site links and associated itself with this other site, then it must be worth something. Backlinking is a sure way to increase your traffic and give a boost to your site ranking.
Monitoring your SEO progress
When you complete all of the above, you may relax a bit. The hard part is done, but it’s not over yet. While you wait for the results of your labor, keep track of what you’ve achieved. You need to be aware of your SEO progress, where you’re at as compared to where you’ve been. Traffic numbers are a good indicator if you’re doing something right. A decrease, on the other hand, means you’ve made blunder somewhere. Next, use domain authority checkers to see how your site is doing in search results.
Don’t forget: SEO takes time to reap the rewards. Results will not be evident overnight. Patience is a virtue, and don’t despair immediately. Give it some time, keep an eye on how things develop, and the results will come.