All Rights Reserved. (C) Lord Vincent Van Mendoza
Hey! Wanna be on top of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)?
— Lord Vincent Van Mendoza (@digitallourd) June 25, 2021
You can optimize your website for different search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo! AOL, etc to maximize your chances of gaining high organic rank. This has something to do with Search Engine Optimization practices with which you should be very familiar. It’s more technical, but easy to follow. You don’t have to learn really how search engines index and rank websites.
1. Research.
Research is not just for obtaining a degree in college. Research is not just an element that breaks friendship. Research can be a powerful tool in SEO.
Research is a very broad area, where you need to delve into the possibilities and opportunities for creating a website and developing a strategy for you online business.
Keyword research
Keyword research is an are of online marketing that should be considered in your general campaigns. Most especially, it is highly valuable when it comes to SEO and paid advertising. That’s because you have to make use of related keywords in order to enable search engines to identify your content and show it to the relevant searches.
Demand research
Another aspect of keyword research includes marketing analysis. You need to explore the online market for you to determine what is lacking (or what potential solutions do you have that others have not yet provided), and what people need. This, in fact, increases the chances of your website to be successful in the digital arena. If you are a local business, you could try conducting a local search by adding the location to your search query, and explore the results you see in the search engines.
For example, “digital marketing Davao“.
I have illustrated this as internet marketing is very in demand in the metro these days. If your website is highly optimized, you are more likely to receive inquiries, requests for callback, and SEO consultancy deals.
For this matter, you could use Google Trends to explore the searches related to a certain keyword. For example, if you use the word “football” as the search term, you can analyze the number of searches over time, regional searches, as well as related searches that can provide additional ideas (that would sure help you out).
Competitor research
This another aspect of keyword research consists of two parts. You will first have to find out who your competitors are. Use the search engines to find the search results that appear when the keyword you find relevant to your content is used in the search query. This will help you discover the websites that are competing for the same keywords as you are.
For example, on Bing, I’ve known my competitors:
After you have discovered your competitors, make a list of their websites, as you will find such very useful later on when you want to track the competitors and compare their progress with your website.
Once you know your competitors, you should analyze their websites, as this can help you find out what they are doing well, and what they are doing wrong. A great tool to help you with this task is SemRush Competitive Research which can help you analyze different aspects of the website and to compare several websites.
2. Choose your domain name well.
You should choose your domain name very carefully. It should to be related to the business you want to present online, and it should contain the keywords you use (whenever possible, but not really required). If you own a brand, the domain name should be your brand name. Just like my friend’s brand name, JeaniusHub; thus, her domain name is jeaniushub.com .
Domain name should also be easy to remember, as this will be your online name, and people have to be able to easily remember it, so that they could find you in an instant. Short and easy-to-remember name is also good if you are going to feature the name on the flyers, business cards or posters.
The same rules even apply for social media usernames or the @digitallourd for Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram. etc.
3. Choose SEO friendly design.
It is generally recommended that you pay attention to this aspect, as the destiny of your website is largely based on the treatment you get from search engines. Thus, you need to make things easier for search engine crawlers, in order for them to promote your website through organic search results. Friendly design refers to the design of the website and the friendly URLs, as both contribute to well-optimized website that can be ranked high in the search engine results.
Hence, if you are into SEO, you need to strike the balance between aesthetics and the lightness of your website. You have to make sure that your web page’s loading speed is good. You could use PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console Mobile Friendly Test to check it out.
4. Add content.
Content is Lord. Over the past few years, content has become the central point of digital marketing and online presence in general. Having highly relevant content on your website has become a crucial factor affecting SEO stanidng.
Ever wonder why most websites nowadays have a blog page? Unlike in the past, when it was not difficult to position a website without any content, evolution of search engine algorithms has come to value content as one of the metrics used when analyzing relevance and influence of a website.
For example, if you offer wedding planning service in Davao, your website could contain several pages with instruction on how and where to hire a wedding planner. While it is good to also include the section about your company and the contact page; however, if you want to improve your SEO score, you should consider adding content that is relevant to your topic, in this case, wedding planning ideas. Nowadays, SEO professionals usually feature content through adding a blog to the website. In this case, articles you could post on your blog could be about types of wedding themes, ideas for an intimate wedding, pre-nup venues, supplies rental, etc. This way, you prominently use keywords without being spammy. The idea with this approach is that you will use content to increase positioning of your website by providing relevant information that both humans and search engines would love.
5. Optimize content.
Creating content is not enough. You need to optimize it. Content optimization refers to the formatting of the text in order to allow search engines to understand it properly, so that search engines are able to match your content with relevant keywords. Here are some aspects of content you should optimize:
Titles
Titles should be catchy, interesting and engaging in order to attract the users to read the entire article. Apart from that, the title of the article must be related to the content of the article, as you should not post misleading titles that have nothing to do with the content. The usage of keywords in the title is also recommended.
Headings
According to eMarketing Institute, each article should contain a few headings where you would highlight the most important aspects of the article. Usage of headings is important for two reasons. Firstly, an article with headings is reader-friendly, as it is well structured and it allows users to scan the text before they decide to read it. Secondly, search engines use heading tag, as well as other tags, such as title tag, to differentiate sections of the website’s page. This way, search engines are able to figure out what is important on your website, as you would highlight the most important parts with headings. You should also try to include keywords in the headings, of course in a natural way that does not disrupt the reading process for the visitors. Please note, though, that you should not overuse this. Specifically for an H1 tag, you should only use one.
Keywords
Usage of keyword in the content is a necessary part, as those are the terms you want your website to be identified with. Therefore, besides using keyword(s) in the title and headings, you should also distribute the keywords in the text of the article (just be careful not to commit keyword stuffing). Besides the exact keywords, using synonyms is also helpful. For example, for “digital marketing“, you may alternatively say, “online marketing“, or “internet marketing“.
Make sure that you are using the keywords in a natural way. Do not sound like a robot, bruh! Write naturally. Be conversational. Speak directly to your audience. You want to avoid randomly repeating the keyword, as this will have negative effect on the readers. As a possible result, they will not read the entire article, they will not share it, and they will most like never come back to your website. This will, in turn, have negative effect on website positioning.
Besides written content, there are other types of content you could use, such as videos or images. Both are useful kinds of content as they are aimed at using the visual effects to attract the attention of your readers. for them to consider going on with your content. Furthermore, presenting content in such form can sometimes be more effective than writing the content down and publishing it in the form of an article.
When it comes to optimizing videos, it is recommended that you provide transcript of the video in the article, below the video itself. Most users will only watch the video, without paying any attention to the transcript, but since search engines are not able to understand the content of the video, they will use the text from the transcript to index that page of your website.
You should also optimize images, for the same reason. Images are most commonly used tool to attract attention of the visitors. Besides presenting a photo or a graph, images can also feature text with an effective message. However, search engines are not able to see none of this, which is why you should use Alt text to add the description of the image.
6. Add a sitemap.
Of all the things that you need to prioritize, NEVER FORGET the sitemap. I have made mention about this for quite a number of times already. In fact, in one of my blogs, “Comprehensive SEO checklist for every specialist“, I have explicitly suggested that you need to check that your XML sitemap is properly optimized and valid. You also need to submit your sitemap to Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, and other webmasters.
You may have a look at my sitemap here:
https://lordvincentvanmendoza.com/sitemap.xml
Another aspect of optimizing your website should be the integration of social media channels. The first part of this integration is allowing users to easily share your content by installing necessary plug-ins such as the one that I’m using. You could check the bottom of this page. You may wish to share this blog. I’d recommend that you place the plugin next to the article, and it allows website visitors to share content on their social media accounts with only one click, without even leaving your website. What I don’t like about placing it at the beginning is that visitors do not have yet enough reasons for them to share your content.
In addition, the plug-in (just like Disqus) usually features the number of times the article has been shared on social networks, which can also be encouraging for visitors to share it.
Besides integrating social media plug-ins, you should also be present on different social media. It is highly recommended that you create social media accounts on the most popular social networks (such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest) as this is a perfect way to stay connected with the social media users. Remember that most of your target customers are on social media. Build presence where they are and lead them to your website.
This way, your audience can stay up to date with the current news, promotions and sales, and these are all the reasons why the internet users will decide to follow you on social networks. Just make sure that you don’t duplicate content across social media platforms. You may check my blog on what to post on different social media platforms.
Having a base of social followers can than reflect well on your website’s performance, as you get the chance to increase traffic and engagement on your website through social media.
Note the in this digital age, it is not enough that you have mounted a website. You need to optimize it so that you get better web visibility. If you need an SEO specialist in Davao, you may shoot me an email at [email protected] .
