SEO Best Practices
Follow our SEO best practices guide to maximize your site’s rankings with search engines.
Once you understand how search engines work, you can start to strategize how to increase your search engine ranking with SEO. Here are five tips for optimizing your content.
1. Make your content relevant
In order to attract an audience, you need to make sure that you’re creating content that is relevant to them. Decide who your ideal audience or customer is, figure out what questions they may have, and then answer those questions with your content. You can do this by creating customer personas, thinking of search keywords your customer might use, and then incorporating those keywords into your website content. Search engines want to make sure that they are delivering websites that closely match search queries so targeted content will perform the best.
2. Keep it natural
Keep in mind that search engines were designed to mimic a user’s experience of your site. If a search engine can’t find or understand something on your website, neither will a potential customer. When writing content, be sure to make your writing simple and natural. Don’t overstuff your copy with keywords or complicated sentences. Tailor your writing style to your audience, making it as formal or informal as you desire, but keep the language and grammar clear and well-written. It is also a good practice to incorporate natural language in your URLs for better navigation.
3. Establish authority
Search engines evaluate websites based on how trustworthy and important their content is. When you establish authority on the web, search engines and customers see you as a trustworthy source for answers and will look to you more often when they have questions. Back-linking—when websites link to your site as a source—and audience engagement help to establish authority. You can engage your audience through social media, comment forums, reviews, and testimonials.
4. Make sure your website is easy to navigate
Search engines must be able to access your content easily in order to quickly understand what your page or website is about. Every page of your website must be accessible to crawlers, so build a site hierarchy in which all pages are linked in an orderly fashion and content is clearly and prominently marked. Use a sitemap to help crawlers navigate even better. Watch out for redundant descriptions, broken links, siloed content, or anything else that might disrupt the browsing experience.
5. Is your website mobile friendly?
These days, a majority of search is conducted by mobile users looking for quick answers to their questions. Mobile search is so prevalent that search engines have changed their algorithms to favor mobile sites. Take a look at your website on a mobile device to see if any changes need to be made. Your site should present well and load quickly. We recommend opting for a responsive website design, meaning that the content will adjust to whatever the screen size, delivering the same experience regardless of the device. You might also want to make simple changes to accommodate mobile platforms by using smaller image files, minified code, and caching. Search engines, and your audience, want the same experience of your website across every device.
Remember: the goal of a search engine is to find and understand content and deliver relevant and authoritative search results based on a search phrase. Keep this in mind when setting up your website and creating content and your rankings should increase in no time.