Nowadays, technology is constantly evolving, and the Internet is one of the most popular technologies. New technologies (website tools for communication with users, payment systems on the Internet, eCommerce, etc) have transformed the Internet into a place for sales and into a powerful marketing tool. The number of Internet users is increasing daily, and the competition is growing as well.
Some time ago the main purpose of using the Internet was to search for information, but today the situation has changed completely. For example, if you check the number of online stores, you can see how the skillful use of Internet technologies brings constant income to the owners of the websites.
So, the main reason for using internet marketing is competition. Your potential client who searches for your website through a search engine can find the websites of your competitors because they have better placement in the search ranking. As a result of this, you can simply lose the customer. According to statistics, 95% of users follow the first 10 links. But you can be in the TOP 10 if you are ready to learn how to do seo for your website.
Search engine optimization is a very complicated and time-consuming process. A marketing strategy has to be selected for each website individually because there is no universal template that is suitable for all of them. There are two types of optimization: on-page (internal) and off-page (external) optimization.
On-page optimization takes a lot of time to set it up as it includes some manipulations with different website elements. In this type of optimization, the most important things are:
- correct layout
- optimization of the code
- presence of the necessary keywords and phrases
- following the rules of micro-marking
- correct filling of meta tags
The most important element here is the unique content. But internal optimization is not the only thing you need to optimize for your website.
Off-page optimization includes the work to increase the link mass of your website which will ultimately increase the domain rating of your website and its traffic. The link mass can be increased by the help of the link placement to your website. The links should be published on some other websites with an initially verified “good” rating. According to the algorithms of the search engines, external links need to be built up sequentially, without hasty changes, otherwise, they will not be noticed by a search engine filter. And that may lead to your website disappearing from the search results. For this reason, the period of external optimization ranges from 2 to 6 months.
If you want to find out how to do seo marketing for your website, then you need to know that the general scheme can be represented in the form of a cycle: Analysis – Strategy – Work – Analysis – Improvements. Website optimization includes the following steps:
- Preparation: competitor analysis and strategy development
- Off-page optimization
- Content creation and publishing
- On-page optimization
- Analytics and improvements
Any conclusions can be made only based on real statistics over several months. Let’s have a more detailed look at the stages of website optimization.
How to Prepare Your Website for a Winning SEO Campaign
- Competitors analysis. Using special services, you need to study websites of your competitors in search results: find out their requests, link strategy, user behavior. You will also need to analyze your niche in terms of marketing, it is especially important to study the industry leaders.
- The choice of strategy. Based on the data of the initial analysis, you will have to build a strategy: pay attention to the general level of competitors, eliminate the weaknesses they have, and offer users the best solutions.
- Semantic core. You will have to collect requests based on products or services. If necessary, you can refer to the achievements of competitors. Read some instructions on how to build a semantic core for an online store on the Internet.
- Clustering queries. We break all the keywords into thematic groups, then assign them to specific pages on the website.
- Creating a website structure. This is the basis of the website. The presence of a clear structure simplifies navigation for robots and users. The logic of the structure should be based on clustering queries.
Checking the Technical Condition of the Website and On-page Optimization
The technical condition is one of the basic components for evaluating a website by search engines. If you want to get to know how to do seo yourself, then keep in mind that your website should work quickly and without errors. On-page optimization is a set of website requirements where the implementation simplifies the work of search robots greatly.
Specifications to pay attention to:
- Download speed. Download time should not exceed 3-5 seconds. Pay attention to the purity and weight of the code, optimize images. You can evaluate the speed of the website using the tool from Google – PageSpeed Insights.
- Security. Take care to protect your website from malicious code, viruses and Internet attacks.
- The correctness of server response codes. All pages should give the correct code that reflects their current state.
- Using HTTPS. The encryption protocol allows you to protect the data that users transmit through the website.
- Cross-browser compatibility. Make sure that pages display correctly in all browsers.
- Adaptive design. The website should look equally good on all screens and devices. Mobile website versions are outdated.
- Quality hosting. It is important for the website to be stable and withstand loads with a large flow of visitors.
- Usability. Think about user convenience. The website should have simple and logical navigation – the main sections should be accessible from the main page. Make sure that the services are intuitive, also make sure that the forms have a minimum of fields and work correctly.
What is included in on-page optimization:
- Registration in webmaster’s console of search engines. This allows you to monitor the status of the website and quickly receive information.
- Adding breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs reflect the path to the page according to the structure. It makes navigation simpler and helps robots.
- Links generation. Addresses (URLs) that are written in a language that people can understand, ease of navigation and improve the appearance of pages in the display.
- Signature of tags to pictures. Each picture should be marked with special tags: title and alt (alternative description). This allows robots to understand the content of the image and increases the relevance of the page.
- Meta tag development. Meta descriptions of pages (title; description) will help users and search robots to understand what content can be found on the page.
- Adding sitemap.xml. A sitemap must be present, thanks to sitemaps, robots are able to find new pages and index them.
- Adding robots.txt. A text file with a set of instructions for search engines allows you to hide the technical sections of the website and unnecessary pages from indexing.
- Setting the correct redirects. From a non-primary mirror to the main host, from some old pages to the new ones.
- Exclusion of duplicate pages. The website engine should not generate duplicate pages with variable sessions, etc.
- Indication of canonical references. Rel Canonical is an attribute that allows you to link several pages that duplicate each other’s content. For example, this is useful for pagination pages. A page that is highlighted with such an attribute will be considered canonical and it will get into the search results.
- Improving the technical side of the site and internal optimization should be fully implemented at the development stage.
Creating Your Best SEO Content
If you wonder “how to do SEO for my website”, then you need to pay the same attention to the content first. Content is what the user comes to the website for, so the requirements for its quality are constantly becoming stricter. The basic content is the text which should be useful and answer the user’s questions. It is preferable to supplement it with quality illustrations and videos.
When all requests are distributed on pages, you can give the task to the copywriter. Besides the texts, the copywriter should prepare meta tags for you. Meta descriptions should include keywords, but they have to be natural and readable. The same is relevant for search terms in the text.
SEO texts no longer work, they have been replaced by LSI copywriting where the text quality is more important than the number of requests. In addition to the main keys, the text should contain synonyms, word forms, and indirect queries.
Visual content
Visual content includes images, photographs, videos, infographics, graphs, etc. Any visualization increases the information content of the text and makes the material easier for perception. However, when working with visual content, it is important to follow a number of rules.
Images should complement the text, enrich it and not violate someone else’s copyright. The ideal option is to use your own illustrations and photos. For example, a business report can be filmed independently. Simple videos can also be edited by yourself.
A variety of content affects the behavior of users on the page – the presence of videos and photos increases engagement. People are more willing to read and share materials. As a result, website behavioral factors can be improved.
How User Behavior Affects SEO
Behavioral factors are search engine metrics that characterize user behavior on the website. For example, how interesting your website was, whether it was useful and answered the relevant questions. Search engine rating is based on visitor satisfaction — the higher the rating, the more often your website will broadcast to users.
Search engines rate:
- The percentage of returns to the issuance. How often a visitor returns to search to find something else.
- Clickability in delivery. This metric is called CTR and shows how often people click on the description of your page in the SERP.
- Leaving rate. The percentage of people who left your website without finding an answer or without waiting for a download. Reducing the bounce rate increases your ranking in the eyes of search engines.
- Time on website and depth of views. A metric that shows how much the user is interested in your website. Good performance is considered to be about 3 minutes and viewing 3-4 pages by one visitor.
- The share of direct visits. These are transitions from bookmarks and from the address bar of the browser. They can show that your website is valued.
User behavior is one of the most influential signals about the quality of the website, it reflects the level of quality of all previous work.
- Properly selected and distributed requests ensure that the user receives an answer to his question.
- Snippets are formed from meta tags and text which motivate you to visit the website.
- Quality content answers user’s questions and provides true and complete information in a structured way. This simplifies the perception and increases the time that the user spends on the website.
- Adaptive design, high download speed and the correct operation of forms make it easy to work with the website on all devices.
- Thoughtful navigation increases the depth of viewing pages. Useful blocks with recommendations and linking. Working with usability makes the website user-friendly.
All of the above factors create a positive reputation for your website — users begin to go to the website directly or look for it in the search results. This fact is noted by search engines and it rates your website higher. Especially, this is important because of the personalization — each user has his own top search results.
High-quality websites gain an advantage over competitors and as a result, receive even more traffic. Websites that violate the rules or do not meet the requirements of search engines are reduced or limited in exposure.
Links as a Google Ranking Factor
Links are very important if you are looking for some advice regarding how to do seo for website. A link profile can be decisive when you are equal to your competitors in other ways. Here are a few modern ways to get links:
- Crowd marketing. Posting messages about a brand, product or service in places where the target audience is present. It can be thematic forums, reviews websites, communities, etc. Advertising supplemented by a link gives additional links to the website and increases the number of natural links.
- External links in articles. You can also buy placement of the finished article with the link. Thus, you can get a thematic environment and can track the quality of content placement. As for donors, you need to choose only those websites having a good reputation. An additional plus — the clicks on links from articles, this will increase the number of traffic sources.
- Advertising. Placing links based on agreements with bloggers, journalists, and website administrators. You can place an article, banner or link in an existing website. The main thing is to find the websites of your industry, and you can do this manually or using some services.
The general trend of link building is avoiding buying links and mindlessly building link mass. Today such a strategy only leads to the imposition of filters on the website. Links have to attract users to the website and act as an additional signal about its popularity.
Some Other SEO Ranking Factors
Indirect criteria that affect the ranking are commercial factors. In fact, they work on user behavior, but in a specific area — commercial. The purpose of these improvements is, firstly, not to be inferior to competitors, and secondly, to encourage the user to complete an order.
Commercial factors include the completeness of information about a company, product or service:
- Address, telephone, office, production addresses
- The presence of the company in Google My Business
- Free phone numbers and online consultants
- A wide range of the products’ descriptions, their images or videos with them
- Examples of work and company reviews, certificates, and licenses
- Shipping, payment methods, and warranty information
Conversion is also influenced by competent prototyping and website design:
- Customer Journey Map — a map of the consumer journey. It allows you to predict how the user reaches the stage of purchasing the goods.
- UX / UI design — designing user interfaces in which usability is as important as appearance. UX-design is based on the experience that the user receives from interacting with your website. UI — is what your interface looks like.
SEO Trends for 2022 That You Need to Know
Every year you can observe a change in consumer preferences which inevitably requires the search for new marketing practices. The marketing industry asks the important questions: “What will be in the trend?”, “What new marketing tools will be popular?”, “How to do seo audit in 2022?”.
Content Transformation
We can already talk about major changes in the quality of the content provided. Content, as a marketing tool, is based on the creation and dissemination of relevant information, which is not connected to the advertising of goods or services, but ideally helps to promote the product.
But as a rule, landing pages of websites do not have effective content and are built on the basis of key requests in a direct or indirect presentation. Until recently, articles had a secondary role in the promotion despite the fact that the bots skipped content promotion perfectly, thereby increasing the productivity of the website.
The use of neural networks tailored to the needs of each individual user, the selection of information for his requests, regardless of formats and types, is direction search has been headed. At the present stage, such technologies in the construction of search algorithms allow only about 20% utility. This allows us to say that in the near future re-optimization will become an obsolete tool, and high-quality content will replace it.
Big Data at SEO
Google has already developed and is going to introduce RankBrain, the new Big Data technology in the search engine. This artificial intelligence technology is built on the principle of converting words into mathematical symbols that are easily recognized by the search engine. This allows you to find semantic keys on the pages even with inaccurate requests or unknown words to Google. In this case, machine learning is built on the basis of our own assumptions, the search for associative words, meanings, and related phrases.
Voice Search and AMP
They are also actively talking about the implementation and prospects of using new SEO development tools and query optimization in search and AMP. Voice search offers a unique opportunity to simplify ordering. However, it will take time before the buyer gets used to ordering goods verbally (setting parameters and not relying solely on visual assessment.)
Another brainchild of Google is the workstation system (Accelerated Mobile Pages). The idea is relevant and progressive. It allows you to quickly access text materials, search engine, video files through mobile devices, thereby increasing productivity and ease of use. For their implementation, fundamentally new versions of HTML and JavaScript are used; they also positively affect the stability and quality of work. The technology is already working in by Google and in the future, it may become a significant factor in a website’s ranking.
Video content
Video content is a leading trend in website promotion and design in 2022. As the analysis shows, users trust and understand the product accompanied by a meaningful video much better compared to a simple statement in text form. Marketers usually observe traffic growth when using relevant videos.
The current state and prospects of SEO-promotion suggest that despite a lot of opinions, forecasting and understanding your consumer and creating high-quality and attractive content remains critical. The digital world is something that faces constant change. All of these changes affect search integration. Some trends have existed for more than a year, some have appeared and have been tested recently. What will really work in 2022 can be predicted, but in matters of optimizing your website’s search presence, the tasks above should not be missed.