How to Optimize Your Website for Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is a term that is used to describe the process of making a webpage or an article more desirable to search engines like google, Bing, yahoo, etc.

This is a very desired part of building a successful online presence either in the form of blog articles or for ecommerce businesses.

Whatever area you are focused on in your online endeavors, understanding the concept of SEO will be a very resourceful tool that will help you get a lot more traffic to your website and consequently more sales for any ecommerce website.

Making your website SEO compliant is mainly putting in places certain key measures that will make the website search friendly.

So that when someone searches for any thing that is related to what you have on your website, that the search engine will see your site as fit and having the right resources that the user is looking for.

Types of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

On Page SEO

This is the optimization that this done on the website itself where you want the search engine to rank and show to users who are are searching for something

Off Page SEO

The off page SEO is the processes that are carried out outside the webpage in order to make the website appear more valuable and resourceful to the search engines.

Therefore, making the search engines to rank the website and show it to users that are searching for things online.

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It is important to note that there is no magic bullet that will automatically make your website rank in search engines as a result of SEO.

But rather there are a myriad of things that have to be done and in collection, they will make your site rank over time in search engines.

Important Search Engine Optimization tips that can make your website rank on google.

Title

The title you decide to use can literally make or break your articles. If the title is good there will be a higher chance that people will want to visit your website and read the full article.

But, if the title is boring and doesn’t inspire the reader to want to check out your post, then your articles will not do well.

Since the primary goal of Search Engine Optimization is to drive traffic to your website, if people are not visiting it then it means that you are not doing the right thing.

To help you craft great titles, you can simply look for other similar websites that are in the same niche as yours and study the way their titles are crafted and get inspiration to write yours.

If you are still not able to come up with a great title, then maybe making use of AI will help you.

Go to h-supertools and and click on the AI menu and go to “YouTube Title Generator” and input any particular keyword that you are writing about and click to generate different titles samples that will inspire you to craft yours.

Because this is a free online tool, you can be sure that many people will also be making use of it, so I suggest that you don’t use the exact title generated by the AI robot, but rather use it as an inspiration to write yours.

This is because the AI might generate the same title for someone else too, and you may end up having the same title with many people and this will greatly hurt your SEO drive.

Tags

Tags are the little keywords that you can add to your articles that are actually related and that can help your article appear in search results.

Just as you can add tags to your social media posts, you can also add keyword tags to your articles and it will help to make it more discoverable by search engines like google.

More so, always make use of tags that are related to the subject matter, so that when search engines lead someone to your website, they can find value in the content and thus stay for some time and read through your articles before leaving.

Because if someone lands on your website and discovers that the content is not related to the keyword that brought them there, they are more likely to exit your website immediately.

When this happens the search engine algorithm will assume that your content is misleading or maybe full of junks.

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And so, the search engine will stop ranking your page and directing people to other web pages with similar keywords.

It does this because it doesn’t want them to have a bad experience and thus it will lead them to a different website that people last longer on.

Images

Images are very important to an article or website in general because it helps to attract visitors to your website especially when your link is shared on social media.

If you have the right image as your featured image, people can quickly determine what the content of the article will be about even before reading the title or article itself.

And it is usually said that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, so the more pictures you add to your articles the more you will get to convey more information with your article.

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More so, when you make use of images, it is very important that you add titles to the images so that they can also be picked up easily by the search engine bots.

Furthermore, do not forget to add “ALT” to your images as well, this will help to make your pages readable to those who are visually impaired.

Also, just in case there is a slow internet connection and the images could not load properly, the ALT title will still convey to the reader what message the images was meant to convey in the first place.

Length of text

Even though the length of an article can sometimes be determined by how broad the topic is about or by how knowledgeable the writer is.

It is also an important factor to consider when optimizing your web page for Search engine optimization.

The strategy is that when you have a longer article there is a chance that the reader might read through it if it is informative enough.

The more a visitor spends time on your page, the more the search engines algorithm assumes that the information on your page is useful and interesting and it will go on to show your page to many more people.

Because the goal of search engines like Google, Bing and the rest, is to help their users get the best information possible for any search query they have typed into the search box.

For this reason it is better to write a longer article than a short one, but you must also make sure that the article is informative and interesting.

So that any visitor who comes across it will read through and not just leave after reading a few words because the post was not informative or misleading.

Remember, when many people visit and leave your page immediately without reading through, your bounce rate will be high.

And search engines will not rank your page with the assumption that the information is misleading and uninteresting.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is a measurement by percentage that google uses to assess how quickly people who visited your webpage exited, without reading or browsing through long enough.

The quicker they leave the higher the bounce rate and the longer the stay on your page the lower the bounce rate. The goal here is to have a lower to average bounce rate at least 60% or lower.

Moreso, the articles must be well spaced with paragraphs to make the text easy to read. Readability is also a key motivating factor that makes people read through an article.

If the text of your article is jam packed and chunky without well outlined paragraphs and punctuations.

It will be difficult for search engine crawlers and even readers to make sense of what you have written even if it is informative.

A good practice when optimizing your webpage for search, is to space out your texts into small paragraphs that are easy to read.

Because this will further enhance comprehension for the reader and make them read through your articles.

Also, having a good continuity flow between paragraphs will also make the reading experience an interesting one for your website visitors. Using words like; therefore, more so, however and the likes are encouraged. 

Links

The more links you have on a page and if the links are pointing to relevant pages, the more valuable search engines will assume that page to be.

These links of course have to be relevant and be leading to other resources that will aid the current article.

If you link to irrelevant pages or articles, it will end up affecting the quality of your article in search engine ranking.

Types of inks

Internal links: these are the kind of links that interconnect the articles and other pages on the website. These types of links help improve the navigation and makes it easier to find information on the site.

With this type of links, you will be able to connect to any other article that you have written in the past that can add more insight to the current article where it is linked from.

External links: these are the links that are leading to an eternal article or webpage, these links are also important when it comes to SEO because it helps link your page to other pages on the internet.

Backlinks; backlinks are links from other websites to your own, this has the ability to help increase the authority of your website when search engines notice that other websites or articles are referring to your webpage.

This will also improve the discoverability of your website. But like we also said before, make sure it is a relevant link always.

Subheadings 

Subheadings are another part of an article that can help make it more desirable for search engine crawlers.

When your articles have subheadings, it makes it easy to read through because it breaks down the whole content into small sections.

The more subheadings that you have the more readable your posts will appear to search engines and thus it will consider your post to be well formulated and thus it will be recommended to visitors.

Ease of navigation is a key important part when you are making your web page SEO friendly, and breaking long articles into small sections definitely helps to achieve this.

Keyword and Keyphrase

Keyword is a single word that represents the idea of the whole article. This is a word that you can specify to search engines to let them know what the article is all about.

Even though it doesn’t give a complete detail of what the article is all about, it is meant to point out what to expect from the article to search engines.

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This concept of keywords was developed back in the early days of the search engines algorithm, when people merely used one word to search for whatever thing they are looking for on the internet. While;

Keyphrase in contrast to keyword, is a combination of separate words that forms a phrase.

Keyphrases are short descriptors that people type into search bars of (google, yahoo, bing, etc) when they are searching for something.

Keyphrases are used when people want to be more specific about what they want to be included in the results that the search engines will pull out for them. Or

People also make use of keyphrases when they are not sure of the exact thing they are looking for but they have an idea of it, so they just combine words that will give the search engine an idea of what to show to them.

In any ways, the goal here is to make sure your webpage shows up when words that are related to your articles are searched for.

To make this happen, you have to deliberately insert some of the words you want your page to rank for in your articles.

Make sure to make use of the word several times in the article. Examples could be: finance, SEO, credit, blogger, robots, etc.

And also include a combination of words that forms a phrase that people can possibly search for to appear somewhere in your article. Examples could be: “make money online”, “self publish an ebook”, “SEO for beginners”, etc.

Meta description

This is not a very talked about part of SEO, but it is definitely a key important aspect of it. 

The meta description represents the line of text that the search engine will display alongside the searched keyword/keyphrase that a user is looking for.

This is a part of SEO that is very crucial in determining if the user is going to visit your webpage or not after the search engine might have shown them that the keyword or keyphrase that they are looking for appears somewhere within your page.

Meta description is like a paragraph of a test where you get to convince the user that you have what they are searching for on your webpage and that they should come over and read more about it.

A good practice for meta description is to write a short description talking about the specific keyword or keyphrase that your article is all about or explaining that you have written a very in depth article on the word or search terms that they are looking for.

Don’t explain everything about the word or keyphrase in the meta description else the user will just read through and not click to visit your page.

But rather give enough information to show that you have what they are looking for, but they will have to visit your web page to get the detailed information.

In the example image above, the keyphrases are the bold words while the summary represents the meta description that tells the user that I have detailed all that they need to know about retail arbitrage.

This will compel them to want to click on the link and visit the webpage to read about the retail arbitrage that they are reaching for.

Good luck!