What are the kinds of things that you can do, to drive more traffic to your website, while encouraging them to browse and possibly purchase the products and/or services you have on them? Well, before any of this can happen, your potential customers, must first, be able to locate your website – and this is where SEO comes into the equation.
Search Engine Optimisation is the process of improving your site’s visibility in the search engines, to drive traffic to it. Below are a number of techniques, tactics, and strategies that you can use to improve your site’s rankings in the major search engines.
Also read: (2024) Does SEO Work for Small Businesses?
1. You Need High-Quality Content
The amount of time people spend on your site can positively or negatively affect its ranking in the search engines. If you provide, highly quality, useful information, then visitors will stay longer on the site, reading and digesting this content.
Content from 2k words and up tends to rank the highest, but there are other factors to consider, like the subject and topic area of the content itself.
You want your content to be as helpful as possible, and so, that is one thing that you’ll want to emphasize above all others. Bigger content does, in many instances allow you to include more keywords, links and get people to spend more time on your site.
2. Put Good Keywords in Your Page Titles
One of the more effective ways for you to rank highly in the search engines is by targeting a good keyword, but it’s also equally important that you implement this keyword into the title of your posts. When you adopt this approach, it can give you more favorable results.
You don’t want to stuff keywords into your page titles, you want it to look seamless. Keyword stuffing, is a no-no for pretty much every search engine out there, so definitely, stay right clear of tactics like that.
3. Optimise Site Images
Images and pictures are things that all good websites should and must have. But, if you want to get any sort of SEO benefit from them, then they must be properly optimized. Things, such as size and file format, need to be considered.
If your image is too large, then it can slow down page loading, which in turn, will adversely affect rankings. Consider resizing or compressing your images, for optimisation sake.
You can also put keywords into your images, via the alt tag, which will help with ranking.
The best way to do this is if you have a page about the best shampoos, for example, you could host an image, and name it the best shampoo in [whichever location].
You can also sneak keywords into image descriptions and captions; so that’s something else you should consider.
4. Site Load Speed
All the major search engines, consider site speed when ranking your website.
Users will leave your website if they are made to wait too long, which may only be one or two seconds. This would, in turn, hurt the amount of time people spend on your site, increasing your bounce rate, and reducing the amount of page views that you receive – all factors that will hurt your ranking in the search engines.
There are so many things that you can do to make your website faster, such as using a caching plug-in, streamlining your site code, optimizing your images (which I’ve already touched on), minimizing redirects, and removing plug-ins you no longer use.
If images on your website are properly optimized, they can have a tremendous effect on the speed of your site.
Research has shown that if you use high-quality images, you can improve the conversion rate of your site. When using images, you can increase trust, and empathy, while at the same time, not hampering the amount of time it takes to access your site, all of which will positively impact your rankings in the search engines.
5. Use Social Media
If you put good content on social media, then it will get pushed around, because of the interest it’s able to attract. If people see your work and can see the value in it, then naturally, they’ll share your information with others on their social media platforms.
This is how the search engines determine what to rank and how high to rank content from social media platforms. Social media also allows others to know what you are up to. Subsequently, you can expect your readers to show more interest in you, driving more traffic to your content in the process.
Author Bio:
Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website where you write extensively on computer-related issues.