January 22, 2018
Gone are the days when SEO equalled keywords. With frequent technological innovation and increasingly restrictive Google algorithm updates, SEO has become substantially more complicated. Now, with Google using over 200 different parameters to assign rank, to claim one of the elusive top spots a website needs to be optimised for users and search engines on multiple fronts.
Content
Creating good, high quality content, is the most fool proof way of generating traffic & revenue. This is because website visitors reach the site organically, that is: your target market arrives at your site through browsing material that is relevant in your section of the market. Whether this is through blog links or shared online material such as infographics and viral videos, creating something that people want to read provides you with free advertising that naturally generates traffic. With new developments in Google algorithms that are now able to recognise synonymous keywords, website content is now becoming more topic rather than keyword orientated which further bolsters the need for good quality content. If you can produce good content that serves a particular topic well, you will be rewarded both by google and by attracting new customers.
Mobile Optimisation
Despite more than 50% of website coming from mobile users, there are still large numbers of websites that have not been designed to be suitable for viewing on a mobile phone. Seeing that a site can be rendered virtually unusable if it isn’t optimised for mobile use, it’s not surprising that a large amount of traffic can be lost if the site isn’t optimised. This also comes underneath the umbrella of SEO because this is a factor that Google considers when calculating rank level. Mobile optimisation can be a simple as new scaling rules of the site design for when the site is accessed from a mobile via responsive page design, or can be a completely different code for a mobile site. The former, responsive page design, is often argued to be better because it allows mobile and desktop users to access the site suing the same URL and is also better navigated by Googles algorithms. However, it can dramatically increase page loading times. There are, however, many different options for how to approach this problem and there are bound to be many more if mobile browsing takes over that of desktops.
Social media presence
The 70% of internet users that have at least one social media account, spend at least 28% of their time online on social media. As time taken away from time to make your business heard, it’s unthinkable now to not have a presence on these platforms. This is because like producing good quality content, presence on social media platforms can organically promote new customers. In fact, gaining followers or fans on social media is also one of the factors used by Google. They can even detect and factor in the quality of your followers. Companies that gradually generate support from on social media by engaging directly with their customers, naturally attract more customers via link sharing and are also viewed more favourably by Google.
Link Building
This is arguably the most important component of SEO because links influence Google rank more than any other factor. For a good rank, your site needs to be linked to by other sites. The more, the better. But not just any old site, it must be a reputable site. Long ago when backlinks were first introduced to Google algorithms, so-called ‘link-farms’ cropped up solely to fulfil the purpose of providing backlinks. Now, with more sophisticated algorithms, link-farms are defunct because Google Penguin now accounts for the reputability and relevance of the sites that provide the back links. Now, links must be achieved by more genuine means. This is another reason why good quality content will serve you well. If you manage to get your good quality content published on a site with a high domain authority, and you’re good to go.
Pay Per Click
Although, technically, PPC and SEO are usually considered as different entities – a good SEO strategy often incorporates PPC. The reason for this is two-fold. First, and this is especially true for emerging businesses, PPC can give a company the exposure that it needs to attract new customers. Even if there is great content on the site, it needs to reach an audience before the content can begin to be shared. And second, results from PPC can be used to inform the SEO tactic. For example, using PPC a website owner can play around with keywords to find that one that works best, and then use these keywords or headings with SEO for best results
