Search engine optimization may not always be the first thing on your mind when you’re cobbling together content for your website or blog, but it surely is one of the most important aspects. To use an angling analogy, if the Internet is a vast ocean and your potential customers are shoals of fish blindly making their way through its gloomy depths, SEO is the bait that will entice them to your fishing rod. Or rather, website. If the importance of SEO can’t be overstated, what are its most salient points?
Creative content
Content should lie at the core of your SEO strategy. Your website’s content will fall into a variety of categories including text articles, photographs, video or audio files, or infographics. It is no use posting any of these elements without giving due consideration to how search engines will actually manage to find them.
Take your images, for instance. How can a search engine spider possibly decipher a bunch of pixels that have been thrown together on webpages? This is where Alt tags come to the fore as they describe graphic files in terms the search engines can understand. These tags are also crucial when it comes to allowing access to your content to people who may be visually impaired: another SEO tick box.
The text you display must be totally relevant to your subject matter. A lot of attention must be paid to editing to ensure that what you are revealing to customers is concise and on-point. You have to seed your content with keywords that will draw in users when they do the appropriate searches.
It is also advisable to make sure your content never remains static for too long. The Internet is a dynamic arena and search engines prefer it when the webpages they inspect are updated and change periodically.
Technical details
Much of the crucial aspects of SEO occur behind-the-scenes. It is one thing to edit and upload text documents on the website’s front-end, but there a lot of text is hidden from view. Like the murky bulk of an iceberg sitting beneath the surface, the majority of any website’s content exists in its coding, nestling between meta tags or content descriptions.
It’s important to ensure these areas are optimized as much as possible, as the spiders will check out these tags to gain a picture of how efficiently your website is structured. Changes to the SEO at this level can affect things like the time it takes to load your pages. Search engines will pay attention to all this information as much as the articles at the front-end.
Site-wide SEO
Most websites that run into several pages will be built according to templates in order to maintain a level of uniformity. But you should never be tempted to try and make amendments to the SEO that will propagate throughout these templates. There is an activity known as tactical SEO that recommends you optimize your site rather more laboriously, on a page-by-page basis. Search engines rate variety far more highly than any form of plagiarism.
This tactical SEO also refers to the introduction of relevant keywords throughout the pages. This is another extremely important facet of your optimization policy because your choice of keyword will determine who is attracted to your site. These vary industry by industry, and must be focused on your central theme without leaving any room for ambiguity. You need to achieve a balance between using words that aren’t so broad they’ll be meaningless as bait, and those that are overly descriptive or ‘niche’ which will have the same effect.
Where you actually place these on your pages is yet another determination. You don’t want to cluster them together; spread them evenly, with more of an emphasis on seeding the tops of articles and their conclusion. Once you’ve gone through the process of inserting your finely-tuned selection of keywords until you’ve reached a point where you think your website has been optimized to the hilt, don’t leave it at that. Just as you have to update your main content regularly, so you need to overhaul your tactical SEO every now and then. Even when considering affiliate marketing programs for your websites you must look at it from the perspective of how this is going to influence your website’s SEO. It doesn’t matter if you are going to use something like this website or will try to connect with the affiliates directly, you must always consider how this affiliate program is going to influence your SEO. Websites must always be an ongoing concern and you must always keep up with the changes the search engines do to their algorithm.