Internet marketing is about making your website easily accessible to the right audience. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques help with this. SEO techniques are processes of modifying your site so that it can be found, understood, and used by search engine users.
Those algorithms can tell if your site content matches up with what people are searching for. The higher you rank in the search results, the more traffic you get. But this isn’t just any traffic. It’s highly-targeted, highly-engaged leads. Otherwise, known as prospects or customers for your business.
The Search Engine Optimization Techniques
Websites with good SEO practices tend to get more traffic. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves regular analysis and reporting of a site’s performance. SEO involves the implementation of various techniques to increase website visitors. SEO techniques collaborate with the aim to get the website on the first page of SERPS.
The SEO techniques listed below show how to search engine optimize websites.
01. Website Optimization
Many people will want you to believe that the sales of your business will skyrocket if you get a website. Yes, you finally put that great-looking website on the internet. But what’s your next move? Sit at your desk and wait for the leads to come in from your website. Stop waiting because they won’t come in like that.
Without website optimization, your site is useless to search engines.
Websites are good customer generation platforms. But, they are only workable or enhanced with good website optimization practices.
In the development phase of your website building process, you must employ SEO techniques. Websites that are SEO optimized are user-friendly and have user experience design. User experience (UX) principles mean the website provides quality to the customer.
UX design will provide websites that are relevant to its target audience. They moreover are search engine friendly. Such websites are mobile optimized and responsive.
02. On-Page SEO Techniques
Use on-page SEO internet marketing. What is on-page SEO? With on-page SEO steps, you create and format content in such a way that it is visible to search engines. Thus, search engines will understand what your content is about. They will know when your content is exactly what a user is searching for.
Web spiders will crawl the internet and find your website. It will store in their database your SEO-optimized information, products, or services. So, if a prospect search for resources in your niche search engines will recommend your site. But if your content is the best search engines will place your business at the top of their results page.
On-page SEO factors consider keywords usage, amounts, and placements. It also deals with the title of website pages and headings within that page. On-page SEO techniques also dictate content quality, length, freshness, and relevance.
Use various ways to research keywords relevant to your website theme or topic. When you find good keywords, create SEO-friendly content using them. This will improve your website’s visibility in search engines.
Do an on-page SEO analysis. Add new content and update old ones to ensure your site’s success. Create SEO keyword-optimized content. Stick to topics that are relevant to the niche your website is in. You may have already published content on your website that is not SEO optimized. It’s not too late to fix this. Re-write your existing content to make them SEO-friendly.
Use SEO keyword research tools such as Ubersuggest, Keyword.io, and Google Keyword Planner. They have free and paid versions of some of those SEO tools. When you find SEO keywords, write good quality content based on the keywords.
03. Off-Page SEO Strategies
What is off-page SEO? Off-page SEO practices also refer to off-site SEO. As the latter name suggests, off-page SEO techniques involve activities external to your website. Such actions relate to your SEO strategy and will impact the ranking of your site in search engines.
Off-page SEO techniques include promoting and advertising your website on other marketing channels. The goal of off-site SEO is to add backlinks to your website and improve your website’s authority. Off-page SEO techniques include link building, brand mentions, and social engagement.
Link building is the SEO tactic used to generate inbound and outbound links to a website. The off-page SEO technique of building website links increases the website’s authority.
Inbound links or backlinks improve the relevancy and quality of your site. With backlinks, you have other websites link back to yours. While, with outbound links, your website links to other sites. There are also internal links, where your website contents link to other content on the same site. All three methods help to improve your website’s visibility and ranking.
Link building tells the search engine that website A thinks the content on website B is relevant. If website A is a website that is popular with search engines, this increases the authority of website B.
Therefore, aim to do link building and get backlinks from high-quality and authoritative websites. Link building from authority websites adds value to your SEO strategy. It tells the Google algorithm that the content on your website has substance.
A few ways to get backlinks are by submitting your website’s URL to various online directories. Get other relevant partner websites to link back to yours. Submit content such as videos and articles to relevant websites.
Search engines also test to see whether a site has social engagement. If it does, the website will have active social profiles. They would also see if the website has a brand mentioned on social media or other platforms.
Guest posting, podcasting, video marketing, social media activity, blogging, shareable content, are all off-page SEO strategies.
Off-page SEO tools include MOZ Link Explorer, AHREFs, Majestic, and Google Search. Use those SEO resources to monitor your link-building progress.
04. Technical SEO
What is technical SEO? Like on-page SEO techniques, technical SEO deals with the website. However, on-page SEO deals with the website’s content. While technical SEO deals with the website structure and integrity.
Technical SEO strategies have a direct effect on the indexing and crawling of a website. Search engines can crawl a website and index the content of the website when you do technical SEO right.
Technical SEO techniques will influence the performance and functionality of the website. Search engines views websites that have strong structural integrity as relevant and authoritative. Such websites perform well and work as they should across devices.
Technical SEO techniques include website loading speed, user engagement, structured data, and canonicalization.
It is important to monitor the loading speed of your website. Search engines and website servers welcome and recommend fast websites. They are kind of lazy. If a website loads slowly search engines give up on indexing that website and move on to the next best site.
Also, users are impatient with websites that render incomplete or have slow pages. This negatively impacts user engagement, usability, and customer experience. Do everything possible to improve your website’s loading speed, visibility, and usability. Analyze, and fix your website speed to benefit search engines and your traffic.
An important aspect of technical SEO is the website’s architecture and canonical links. Review the website’s URL structure, sitemap, and canonical versions of the site. An XML sitemap and simple URL structure will help the web spiders to crawl a website easier.
Web crawlers also check mobility and security for technical SEO ranking factors. Such as whether the website is mobile-friendly and secure. Domain name registration and history also influence search engines indexing a site.
Some technical SEO tools like Screaming From, SEMrush, GT Metric Page Speed Report, Ubersuggest, and MOZ Bar work best. Those SEO tools will provide SEO reports on your website’s performance. If you see any SEO problems, you must fix them as soon as possible. We will discuss SEO audits soon.
05. Local SEO and Organic SEO
Local SEO and Organic SEO are two other terms associated with SEO. These content optimization techniques can pivot the online presence of a website.
What is Local SEO? Local SEO techniques answer a question relevant to on-site business and services. How to get users in a specific geographic location to access a website? For instance, a retail brick-and-mortar store that wants to attract locals. Therefore, web advertising techniques must optimize your site using local SEO methods. Local SEO techniques focus on making a business website relevant on local platforms. If users nearby search for a product or service, local SEO points to location-based businesses.
For example, use Google Maps and Yelp, and other local directories. Such directories help crawlers to know your geographic location. It helps crawlers to determine whether a search user can access the product or service you offer. With local SEO you can optimize a website to attract customers using local search terms only.
What is organic SEO? Organic search engine optimization is another term for the SEO sub-categories already discussed. Such as link-building techniques and SEO keyword research. The striking difference with organic SEO is that the methods are all unpaid.
Organic SEO techniques are the cost-less way that causes your website to rank high in SERPs. When you optimize your website for search engines, you will get some organic results. This means that you did nothing specific, but web crawlers suggested your site. Because of your site’s relevancy to a topic and good reputation.
06. Search Engine Optimization on Google (SEO)
With SEO your internet marketing strategy must also pay attention to Google. It is the largest search engine with worldwide reach after all. Optimization for Google helps with local SEO and organic SEO practices.
Google algorithms will zap any website that uses bad marketing practices. So, stay away from blackhat SEO practices. Google Panda is waiting to destroy any site that uses spamming and phishing. The powerful web crawlers of Google notice improper backlinks. Improper link building is harmful. They do not always improve a site’s ranking in search engines.
Websites that had high traffic dropped below par when Google Panda flag them for using black hat SEO techniques. Such sites hardly ever bounce back once they get a bad reputation. Google does algorithm updates to keep bad SEO practices within their sight.
So be smart and use good SEO practices only. Google will love your site if you care about user experience as much as Google does. This means that your website targets its customers. It gives it the reputation of providing value to customers and a good internet experience. A website that caters to user experience, targets the right customers. It provides those customers with the resources, products, and services that they need.
Google search engine caters to mobile-first. This means that your website must be mobile-friendly. From the start of your website development project let your web designer know this rule. A mobile-friendly website is responsive. It would give a good customer experience. It matters not what device screen size or type the user is viewing the website from.
Use Google SEO tools. SEO tools such as Google Console formerly Webmaster. Google Console would help you to monitor the indexing of your website. You can add an XML sitemap and check the performance of your site in Google SERPs. Google Pagesspeed Insight tests the loading speed of your website. It checks the speeds of both mobile and desktop. For SEO keyword research use Keyword Planner, LSI Keywords, Google Suggest, and Google Trends. Those Google marketing tools are free SEO resources. You can find trending, relevant, and often used SEO keywords. Use those SEO keywords found for content optimization.
07. Search Engine Optimization Analysis & Reporting
SEO analysis and reporting are primary SEO strategies. A website’s SEO analysis will reveal whether the website employs good SEO techniques.
SEO audits to analyze and identify the website performance, ranking, and domain authority. With SEO analysis you can also see how your brand online stands against your competitors. Analyze the website competition domain authority and popularity. This is important as it lets you know what you need to work on to optimize your website.
You must schedule times to analyze your site for SEO issues. An SEO audit will test your website performance against best SEO practices. It will check your website link-building performance, broken links, and external link quality.
For example, an SEO analysis of a website will produce an SEO report. An SEO report will disclose how your website is performing. You will see what is doing well in terms of SEO strategies. Besides, see areas your website would need to correct for your website to perform better. The report may say that the site is loading slowly or has broken links.
On review of the SEO report, your online marketer would know what to do. They must do SEO strategies to make your website faster. As well as find and fix all the broken links on the website.
Another example is that the online strategist would analyze your website’s content. Then provide an SEO report to you saying that your content length is too short and has no keywords. The online marketer will discuss content optimization strategies. An SEO fix is to re-write all content on your website following SEO best practices. Such as longer content with SEO keywords therein.
Use SEO tools for website audits and study the SEO reports. Some SEO analytics tools are Hubspot Website Grader, Google Analytics, SEOquake, and BROWSEO. SEO analysis and reports will identify SEO issues and make suggestions to fix them.
Closing: What does Search Engine Optimization mean?
Search engine optimization is an important internet marketing technique. It involves SEO processes that improve a website’s structural integrity and visibility. SEO makes web crawlers find, read, and index a website in search engines.
As already mentioned they are several online marketing channels available. Plus, each channel comes with various techniques and strategies.
On-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO are all categories of SEO. But with SEO, there are also, Google SEO, Local SEO, Organic SEO, white hat SEO, and black hat SEO. Use these various SEO techniques to improve your ranking in search engines.
In summary, call online marketing strategies that impact web browsing, search engine optimization. SEO techniques and tactics help to alert search engines about your website’s content and existence. It is one of the best practices for online marketing.
All the best with implementing these various SEO techniques and strategies.
