Search Engine Optimization: Get Found on the Internet
The Importance of SEO
The term “SEO” is one of the most used and cliche terms that come up when talking about online marketing. It has been used so much that one might get tired of hearing or reading about it. Still, the importance of SEO today has not been greater ever. SEO still matters!
What Exactly Entails SEO Today?
Yes, it is true SEO is a term that has been around since practically the beginning of the internet with the emergence of search engines such as Google.
SEO has definitely changed through the years, though. It has evolved and is still evolving and is to be considered one of the main aspects of an effective online marketing strategy.
The number of users using the internet and using search engines is still growing. Also, the development of new search engine technologies such as voice-activated search (Google Alexa, Apple Siri) and possible searching by other senses will increase this even more.
Search engines also change their search results algorithms to be more and more tailored to the individual. Meaning it can really pay off when your specific website content is specified to your designated target audience.
SEO Best Practices
What makes your website top the search results of a search engine? Let’s dive into the most important aspects of sound search engine optimization.
Content
Tailor your content as much as possible to your specific target audience. Search engines like Google increasingly personalize their user’s search results and try to return search results that are most relevant to the user, based on its search behavior and characteristics. This increases the importance of specific content on your platform or website. Therefore, incorporating an as accurate as possible description of your content in HTML meta tags, HTML title tags and alt descriptions of images and certain keywords in your text content is more important than ever.
Speed
Make sure your site loads fast, this is an important factor when ranking high in search engines. Search engines are about accessible content, next to relevant content. Pagespeed plays a major factor in the accessibility of content. Google PageSpeed Insights tool is an excellent tool to test your website’s accessibility.
Mobile Friendly
Make sure your site is mobile friendly. If your website is still lacking in mobile accessibility, then it is time to up your game! People using mobile devices to access the internet accounts for over half of all traffic. Ensure your website is responsive in that it scales to the screen size of the device being used to access it.
Secure
Again, accessibility is a major factor in determining the search ranking a search engine attributes to a website. More and more, the security of a website plays an important role in determining the accessibility of a website. Google even displays a warning whenever a site is deemed ‘insecure’ and prompts if you are sure to continue visiting this site. This is most often due to the insecure website not being HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure) encrypted and still employing the standard HTTP protocol. Nowadays it is easy to ensure your website adheres to the HTTPS protocol since most web hosts offer this for free through services such as Letsencrypt
Clean Structure
The search engine ‘crawlers’ or ‘bots’, index programs that go through your site, value clean design in code and structure. This is a fairly technical side of SEO optimization. It is about your site being developed and organized according to official guidelines and practices in which websites are built and structured.
Backlinks
The internet isn’t called ‘The Web’ for no reason. Everything is connected and one of the most important aspects in determining the value of a webpage is the number of ‘quality’ links a webpage contains. This pertains to internal links (links leading to other pages on the same website domain), external links (links leading to (quality) webpages on other websites and maybe the most important one, backlinks (links from external websites leading to a webpage).
Conclusion
Although the term “SEO” may be a clichéd word, it remains of great importance in the online marketing strategy. The importance of good SEO is even greater than ever. A good SEO is characterized by quality and relevance in content and qualitative accessibility. The trend of search engines increasingly serving the individual means that the importance of SEO will become even greater in the future.
