One of the biggest challenges websites face today when trying to bring in and retain customers is the user experience on the site. Imagine for a moment, a yacht. The on-page elements represent the sails and the ropes above water. Now imagine the technical elements of SEO are everything below the water line: the hull and the cabin. So you could have your sails blowing, and your knots tied correctly, but if there’s a hole in the bottom of your boat you’re not going to get very far. SEO is simply the process of getting website traffic from “free” or “organic” search results in search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo. All major
search engines have primary search results that are ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. SEO helps maximize
the number of visitors to a particular website or page by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine. Inbound links pointing from other websites to your website are critical to establish the credibility of your business in Google’s eyes.
Google loves speed and so should you
Search engine experiences are becoming increasingly personalized. That’s why it’s important for businesses to focus on long-tail and location-based keywords—so that audiences can find your company based on the exact value and service that you provide. Visual content is
more important than ever. It manages to supplement text in the best possible way (or even to replace it) and it certainly can affect SEO. In the same way a landscape architect needs to understand the elements of the property he is designing for in order to achieve the goals of the project, you need to understand how your website stacks up to your competitors, what gold (or iron) may be underneath the surface, and how your surrounding environment can impact the outcome of your campaign. From an SEO perspective, I never treat a piece of content as ‘complete’. There is always room for improvement with updates, additional information, and various other things that can make it more useful to visitors.
Understanding the rationale behind XML sitemaps
As Google continues its journey for the perfect user experience on their own site, you have to strive to keep up. SEO can be
a fuzzy concept that feels like more art than science. Don't let yourself be intimidated; it's easier than you think. When you’re browsing the web, the content you come across can come in a number of different flavors. Often, the nature of the content can tell you a little about the owner of the blog/website too. Either this is a website belonging to someone who is mostly interested in their visitors and who doesn’t care whether they ‘rank’ or not; or it’s content that is clearly aimed at Google, with the visitors as an afterthought. Local SEO refers to making a company's website more visible on maps and in local-oriented searches, often for people seeking a brick and mortar store or a services based business that serves their area.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Any link that you create on your own should be set at “no follow”. The reason for this is that you’re essentially telling Google that the link was created to generate traffic and not to artificially boost your search engine results. Google is getting smarter – to the point of becoming an AI with a LOT of personal information about its uses. Google is increasingly understanding what content actually means, rather than just what it says You should not try to‘trick’ Google. Google alone uses over 200 different signals in order to rank web pages and these signals change based on the type of content, industry, user intent, and other factors. There is not a one size fits all approach to SEO and what works for one business may not work for another, even if they’re in the same industry.
Gaz Hall, an SEO Expert from the UK, said: "A general rule to follow when creating your new URLs: use dashes (-) between words
instead of underscores (_). Google treats dashes as separators, which means it can
return results when you search for a single word that appears in a URL and when
you search for a group of words that appears in a URL. In contrast, Google treats
underscores as connectors, which means it will only return results when you search
for a group of connected words that appears in a URL. The bottom line: using dashes
creates more opportunities for your pages to be discovered."
Become a source of qoutes to boost SEO
Although lead generation via the Web is less direct than an ecommerce transaction, it is arguably just as valuable and important for building customers, revenue, and long-term value. Once you have
exceptional content, you need to find ways to get that content out there and seen. That’s where social media comes in. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and LinkedIn continually prove to play a major role in doing business online. And with social signals—like follows, shares, likes, Google+’s and retweets — influencing search engine results, your business’s social media presence is something to take seriously. You can think of importance as a way to determine which page, from a group of equally relevant pages, shows up first in the search results, which is second, and so forth. The relative authority of the site, and the trust the search engine has in it, are significant parts of this determination. SEO can be difficult to understand and due to its ever changing nature, it can feel like a chore to keep up.