SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of increasing website traffic through organic search results using platforms like Google and Bing. Small business SEO greatly helps in bolstering clients, driving traffic and ultimately brings in greater revenue. Some of the DO’s and DON’Ts that you should ensure to boost traffic to your website are as follows:
DOs
Website Links
One of the primary things that search engines look for is the quantity and quality of websites that have links to your site. The content of the site that contains the link, its relevance to the same, the importance of the site in the online market and the amount of traffic received by the same are some of the primary deciding factors. E.g. some prominent news channels like NDTV with your site link will have greater relevance than some random website with almost negligible traffic.
Keywords
The previously held belief that keywords are important to a site’s ranking still holds, even though they are not the sole deciding factor. You should include keywords in your website’s domain name (www.keyword.com) and not the stem of its URL (www.abc.com/keyword), to avoid being penalized by search engines. Also, you can add the keywords to the title tags of source code and meta description of the website.
Content-rich information
Besides the placement of keywords, a strategic research of relevant keywords is necessary to attract traffic. Keyword phrases should be content rich and have a conversational sound rather than a marketing vibe. A long-tail approach, publishing good, informative content filled with keywords also helps in better conversion rates.
Prevent duplicacy
To prevent copyright infringement and ensure the originality of the content, you should not republish articles from other sites, which might also downgrade your site rankings. You can check for the same with websites like Copyscape and Steiner.
Load Speed
Your site’s load speed is also an important factor in converting potential visitors to customers. According to Amazon, one-second increase in load speed might result in the company losing sales worth $1.6 billion per year. Sites like Pingdom can help you check your site load time and give you a breakdown of each element and individual load time.
DON’Ts
Irrelevant links
Good quantity of your website links is important but irrelevant links will only lower your webpage ranking, as a violation of Google’s Webmaster guidelines, including comment spam in Blogs, hidden links, buying expiring domains, etc.
Spam Tricks
Shady services i.e. black hat SEO techniques are only useful for a short term. Google frequently updates its algorithm to prevent these hacks and penalizes the websites that employ these techniques.
“Free for all” link pages
You should avoid placing links on sites where anyone can place their link. Such websites have very low relevance and eventually cost you rankings with search engines.
Irrelevant keywords
Do not stuff your website and its meta tags with irrelevant keywords, keywords that have no relevance to your content. When caught by search engines, they only lower the page ratings.
Optimizing your website is a necessity to keep with the fast changing search engine industry, which also ensures that the website has better positioning in organic search results. These are some of the factors one should keep in mind to ensure the best SEO for your website.