Effective SEO Techniques That Would Definitely Work for Your Business

These days most of the businesses have a website of their own. Your website is like your company’s online face. It is built to bring you more business. And all of us, while searching the Internet tend to limit ourselves to considering the options that are listed on the first page. Very seldom we search the following pages.

 What if your business is never found? This where SEO comes in the picture. It provides you with techniques that help rank your site higher in search results thus giving your site the much-wanted traffic.

 

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is a set of techniques that help you place your website in a favorable position in the search engine “free”, “natural” or “organic” search.

If your site ranks higher in the search results, you tend to get more traffic, more leads and hence more business.  It boosts your organization’s reputation and increases trustworthiness.

 

How Search Engines rank the sites?

All major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc., have crawlers that collect the information about the websites and index them. The search engines employ certain algorithms to rank the websites in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

 

SEO Techniques: The way up the success ladder

Organizations to increase their revenue and business look for opportunities online. This is possible only through getting ranked higher in the SERPs. So, here are several SEO tactics that can be employed to improve the ranking of your business.

SEO can be done in the following ways: -

  1. Onpage SEO.
  2. Offpage SEO.

 

Onpage SEO: Optimize your website

Onpage SEO is a bunch of tactics employed to optimize the individual webpages to increase their ranking on the SERPs.

 

  • Quality Content 

 

High quality content is essential for any website. The content must be long and interesting enough to attract the attention of the visitors. They must be enticed to go through the whole of it.

 

Search engines determine the quality of the content by the number of repeat visits to a site, the number of searches for a site, bookmarks and time spent by the visitors on the site.

More the content on your website is shared, more are the chances of being ranked higher.

 

  • Effective use of Keywords

 

Keywords are the words or phrases that users enter in the search engines to get the information they require. The results for obtained include everything words, phrases, images, videos and more.

 

You must research the keywords that generally users enter to reach similar sites and use them in your content. Keywords which have too many searches and are highly competitive are not too much of a help so target keywords which have more chance of ranking you higher in the search results.

 

  • Appropriate use of Title Tag

 

The title of the page must be relevant because it is displayed as a clickable item in the search results. The title must not be too lengthy else it will be truncated by the search engine.

 

In HTML, the title tag is used to set the title of the page. You must write titles which contain relevant keywords, are of appropriate length and are unique. You must use a different title for each page. Using action words, like get, take, learn etc.in title tags also helps.

 

  • Meta Tags and Description

 

Meta tags are part of HTML code that contain phrases describing the content on the page. They are only a part of the code and are never displayed on the page. It is from these tags that the search engine picks up information about the content of your page.

 

The name and content clause of the meta tag can be used to provide keywords and description of the website. Search engines match the tags and descriptions with the page content while ranking the site.

 

  • Meaningful headings

 

A content which contains headings and subheadings is more readable than a content without headings. Therefore, headings must be meaningful and guide the users about the content.

For SEO purpose, the H1 tag may be used to contain focus keywords. Focus keywords are the keywords which you would want searchers to enter to reach your site. You must prefer long tail keywords as they have greater chances of being listed.

  • Well-designed URL

 

To make your URL user friendly, it must conform to certain criteria. The URL must speak about the content of your page. URLs must contain the keywords. Static URLs is more user friendly than a dynamic one. An XML based sitemap containing all the URLs to be included in SEO may be designed.

 

  • Optimize images and multimedia

To optimize images for SEO, they must be small with relevant name and alt text. Use of keywords in other multimedia like videos, pdfs and infographics also helps.

  • Usefulness of internal links

 

Internal links are the links within a website from one page to another. A search engine tracks all such links and stores the information. So, it is advisable that a pyramid like structure be implemented to enable the search engine to reach all the pages on the site. When one page within a website links to another one on the same website, it said to be passing ‘Page Authority’ and helps in ranking the pages.

 

  • Leveraging social sharing buttons

 

Using the right social sharing buttons at the right places enhances your SEO. Good content can go viral which increases referral traffic to the website and reduces bounce rate.

 

  • Make the best use of responsive design

 

These days as the number of mobile users in rapidly increasing, a responsive web design is a necessity. It will reduce the bounce rate and provide all the information users want on any device they use. The content is at one place making maintenance easy. Moreover, Google ranks responsive design higher than non-responsive design in mobile searches. A backlink to your original site is helpful.

 

  • Take advantage of Outbound links

 

Outbound links are links from your site to another website. They may be dofollow links (normal links) or nofollow links (links which stop the crawler from listing the page in search results). The outbound links have a positive effect on your rankings. Google uses the outbound links in determining website authority which is considered while ranking a page.

 

  • Opting for local SEO and listings

 

Local SEO helps to list your website when a localized search is done. It is mainly to attract the local customers to your brick and mortar local business.

 

Offpage SEO: Make the best use of resources other than your website 

Apart from all the tactics that you can apply to your website for improving the rankings, there are other means which are outside the scope of your website which can be used to place your website higher in the search results.

Here are some important off page SEO techniques that can really help: -

  • Quality Link building

 

Getting links from other websites to your site really helps. If the site containing the backlink is a reputed and relevant site, all the better. It boosts your rankings in the search engine results.

  Here several link building techniques you can use:

 

Directory submission

It means submitting your URL and company information to a web directory. The more frequently, the search engine encounters your website, greater are the chances of getting placed higher in search results.

 

Guest blogging

It is also known as guest posting. Guest blogging/posting is having your blog published on another site. You can have links to your site from this blog. It adds to your authority and reputation.

 

Article sharing

Articles are lengthier than blogs and provide more information. It is a great idea to get your articles published on high ranking sites.

 

Forum postings

Joining forums which are relevant to your domain is a good option for building backlinks. It’s also a great way of getting in touch with your community.

 

Comments

Many blogs and articles are accompanied by the comments section. Most of the comment sections let you place a backlink apart from sharing your views.

 

Documents sharing

Apart from blogs and articles, PDFs and PowerPoint slides can also be shared on some sites. They also let you place backlinks.

 

- Question and Answer sites

We are all aware of Quora which a Q&A forum is. You can place backlinks along with your answer.

 

Broken Link Building

If you report a broken link on a website, the host site may let you display your link on their site.

 

Image sharing sites

Instagram is a great example of an image sharing site. You can place links to your site through images.

 

Infographic sites

There are many infographic sites. You can place the link to your site on the infographics you submit.

 

  • Social Media Marketing (SMM)

 

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to promote products and services. The main aim of SMM is to provide for a social media presence, sharing content and receiving feedback. Major social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and YouTube to name a few.

 

You should aim at building high quality content for your website so that it may be shared by more and more people. Facebook, for example, lets you advertise for free by means of Facebook pages. You can also run paid campaigns on Facebook. This way you can reach a large number of people. They could be followers of your page or ones who have been reached by boosting posts. So, SMM not only builds an audience, increases reputation but also provides you the much-needed backlinks.

 

  • Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking provides means of reaching and sharing the site you like, easily. Bookmarking information is saved to the web and not to the web browser. Social bookmarking sites let you bookmark your favorite sites. Other visitors can view your bookmarks by using proper keywords or tags.

They are useful in increasing traffic to your site and getting ranked in search engine searches. Sometimes the visitors may bookmark your bookmarked page on another bookmarking site thus increasing your traffic and reputation. It’s a great idea to include social bookmarking buttons with your blog or content so it is easily sharable.  

Business Reviews, Business listings, Press Releases, and Classifieds are other ways of performing off page SEO

 

Conclusion

All the above-mentioned techniques are ways of performing SEO. It would be a great idea to adhere to them as much as possible to reap the benefits of SEO.

 

You should create high quality content that is successful in drawing the audiences’ attention. SEO will work for your business if implemented properly.