SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization has become a buzzword over the last decade or so, but still many expertises are still confused on how to do it. When correctly put into practice, SEO marketing can drive traffic to your site and therefore make your brand more recognizable.

SEO is also able to push you up the search list on search engines like Google. Therefore SEO marketing is something you’ll need to understand and master in order to attract people. These are the top 10 SEO factors that will make your site rank higher:

1.A Proper and Acceptable URL

The URL is your website address and having one that is easily accessible to the Google bot. Keep the address clean and simple to make the public remember easily. Avoid long or complicated names and a long series of numbers. For example, if your website deals in used books, a typically acceptable URL would be ‘www.usedbooks.sg’ and not ‘www.usedbooksallforyou3344889.com’.

2.Fast Download Time

Your site speed is a major contributing factor to increase SEO. Sluggish websites with heavy graphics and videos that take ages to load usually don’t show up well on search engines because people tend to avoid them. Make sure you keep your website light and easy to load and navigate. Minimize unnecessary graphics, videos, GIF files or other heavy files. It’s important that you do a download speed test every now and then to make sure all your pages load smoothly and quickly.

3.Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are the short descriptions that are attached to your website or page title in the search engine results. This short description should be about 125 – 150 characters and summarize the content of your page. It’s crucial to include keywords strongly associated with your site in the meta descriptions.
While search engines do not depend on meta descriptions for page rankings, it does help push up the visibility of your page by increasing click-through rates, positive page perception and improved search results perception. This is why your meta descriptions need to be catchy and interesting.

4.Headline Titles

The main aim of having good SEO practices is to increase your site’s rankings on Google search. Therefore, one of the best ways to do that is to have an attention grabbing headline. Headlines need to convey the gist of the content in a way that will spark the curiosity and interest of netizens.

Coming up with compelling headlines is absolutely essential in generating click-troughs and the more click-throughs you have, the better your site will rank in the search engine list. In saying this however, it is important to avoid click-bait headlines, which are headlines that over exaggerate or falsely represent the content. This may push the overall perception of your site down.

5.Keywords in Content

To generate more hits for your content, your content should include SEO keywords which are relevant to your services. SEO keywords are phrases or words associated with your subject matter that could lead to the highest amount of searches online.

For example, if you’re writing an article about used books, your keywords should include keywords like books, secondhand, pre-loved, magazines and so on. In order to determine what keywords you need, you can always use a keyword analysis tool, like the Google Keyword Planner.

Deploying SEO keywords in your article isn’t the only practice to do instead, embracing informative and useful content does attract users to stay longer reading your article.

6.Targeting and Compartmentalising Keywords

Keywords should be specific to your content. This means you shouldn’t use the same keywords across all your written content. When planning your content, make sure that the keywords are unique to that particular page.

The problem of having the same set of keywords for all your content is that your pages will then compete with each other for ranking, rather than with other sites. This will then cause your page ranking to fall as the click-troughs will be divided between all your pages rather than concentrated on one page.

Compartmentalizing also allows you to include a larger variety of keywords and therefore increase potential traffic from a wider audience.

7.Generating Quality Backlinks And Internal Links

Backlinks happen when other sites generate a link to any of your pages. The more backlinks direct to your website, the higher your rank on the search engine. Search engines consider backlinks as a form of support and endorsement for your website. It gives the impression that your site is trustable and useful. You can also use a backlink checker to see which sites have linked you in their content, and have collaborations with other sites to have them feature you.
Backlinks are also known as inbound links, and they work with internal links to increase the SEO ranking of your site. Internal linking is when you link one page to another in the same domain using an anchor text. For example, in your site selling used books, you’ll want to link your home page with a page titled ‘How to Identify Genuine Rare Books’, and vice versa.

8.The Availability of a Mobile Version

Although this may seem like a trivial matter, the presence of a mobile version for your site will immediately make it more appealing to users. This is because the majority of netizens today surf the net from their mobile phones. Making a mobile version for your site that is optimized for smaller screens and portability.
Statistics have shown that more people actually use mobile phones rather than computers nowadays. Therefore, having a mobile version will increase the number of possible hits for your site. The more hits you get, the higher your site ranking.

9.Choosing Optimized Images

Images don’t just decorate or depict your content, they can be used to improve your SEO results too. Tagging and labeling these images with the correct keyword will make them appear on image searches as well as enhance the click through rate. Moreover, images can also be a key factor of improving user experience, which will be mentioned in the following part

10.Retaining Views Through User Experience

Not everyone who clicks on your site will stay, and this is called bouncing. Your goal is to keep visitors on your site as long as possible, and prevent them from bouncing. Apart from engaging content, you can also employ things like surveys, videos and more. The longer viewers stay the higher your SEO ranking will be. That’s why it’s important to focus on user experience.
You’ll also want to keep your viewers coming back to the site on a regular basis. To do this, you’ll have to be innovative and add newer aspects to the site every now and then.

In essence, it’s actually not difficult to implement SEO aspects in your marketing strategy, whether it’s your website or social media content. Search engine marketing is truly the marketing that you need to focus on in this day and age.

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