Have you tried to find information about a product or details about a business you want to go to on the Internet? Where did you go to find it? Chances are you fired up search engine such as Google, Yahoo or Bing and typed the keywords about the product or business. Once you found some search results you clicked on the first few pages to go to the relevant websites. Did you bother to go past first 2 or 3 pages of results returned by the search engine? The answer is most probably “No.”
The mechanism by which search engines determine which websites to show up first in the results page based on the keywords provided by the user is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. SEO plays a critical role in landing on the first few pages of the search engine results. If your website is not optimized for advanced SEO you are going to miss out on the visitors who will be looking for the products you sell or businesses similar to yours impacting your sales significantly.
How do you optimize your website with SEO so that it lands on the first few pages of the search engine? There are number of nuances involved – some are easier to implement, while others need help from the experts. Below we show some of the important aspects of SEO you must know:
- Site Optimization – Optimizing your site involves making sure your web pages are loaded fast when the user clicks on the URL. It also means images on your website are scaled so that they do not take long time to render on users’ browser. There are number of ways in which you can optimize the website, such as making use of browser cache, deploying faster servers, minimizing the use of scripts that take long time to process. If you don’t know the technical aspects of the website it is best to seek help from someone.
- Device Formats – These days users have multiple options to access websites. They could be using a desktop computer, cell phone or tablet, even a television. Your website should be displayed properly that matches the format of the device they are using. If the web page is not displayed to fit the type of device search engines will penalize you with lower ranking. The users also might move on if they are not able to read the content properly on the device they are using.
- Content Formatting – Those who are somewhat familiar with HTML know that how the website content is displayed on users’ device is determined by HTML tags. Proper use of the tags such as H1 and metadata will ensure that the search engines are able to recognize and match your content to the right keywords.
- Content Quality – In addition to content format, the type of content and frequency with which it is updated also plays crucial role in SEO. If the content on your website has been stale for long and is not organized well chances are you will not be landing on the front pages of search engines.
- Links – Search engines determine the quality of the websites based on how many other sites you have linked to as well as how many and what type of external websites have linked to yours. Having number of quality links to and from your website is one of the most important factors in determining the SEO ranking.
As you can see there are number of factors that determine how your website will be ranked in search engines. Understanding these factors and optimizing your website, either yourself or with the help of SEO experts, will enable it to be on the first few pages of the results providing you more web traffic and sales.
