SEO: How to Optimize your Website to Drive Traffic and Increase your Domain Rating (PART TWO)
Authority, relevancy, and quality were the stars of the first part to our SEO guide which explained the importance of these three elements that are often referred to as the pillars of SEO.
Part two builds upon the fundamentals outlined in part one and explains how you can apply your newly gained knowledge to your own website to improve your domain rating and start ranking higher on SERPs.
Keywords
If you’re not prepared to spend the time researching and improving your keywords, then you may as well forget about reading the remainder of this article because keywords are one of the foundational elements to improving your domain rating.
But what exactly do we mean when we talk about keywords?
Keywords describe what the content of a web page is about, and they are crucial to making your content appear on search results and in front of your target audience.
If you compiled all of your website content — from images, to blogs, to your ‘about us’ page — your keywords should be able to define all of this data in just one or two words or phrases, which show what your website or web page is offering.
When someone searches for something online, they’re basically using keywords or phrases that best match what they want. Keywords play the role of the middleman between your content and search queries, so whichever keywords you decide to target, you must make them relevant to what you’re offering on your web pages so you can become visible. See how relevancy is important here?
Every web page on your website should target specific keywords but be careful not to target multiple keywords for one web page as this confuses search engine spiders and makes it difficult for them to understand what the page is about when they are trying to index web pages, causing your domain rating to drop. To combat this issue, create multiple web pages and have each of them target individual keywords or phrases.
One of the more difficult aspects with SEO and keywords is finding and picking the most effective ones to include in your content. There are plenty of tools available online to help research and pick keywords, both paid and for free, so utilize these tools and look for high volume keywords that are low in competition. This just means they are words or phrases that are being searched for in higher amounts, but have less content related to these specific words or terms.
If you’re really struggling to find suitable keywords, you could try combining two or three high volume, high competition keywords and stitch them together to create more viable options (we recommend against this if you’re new to SEO).
Long-tail keywords are commonly used within SEO and these are simply a more specific combination of keywords. The keyword ‘shirt’ is classed as a far-reaching keyword, because it will have a huge volume of traffic linked to it, and competition to rank with this will be fierce. To address this, a good long-tail alternative to ‘shirt’ may read something like ‘men’s cotton blue striped shirt’ which will have less competition and increase your chances of appearing on SERPs.
Our final point on keywords is that you should be including keywords in your page titles because this is the first text that will be read by search engines and by web traffic. As well as in page titles, you should be getting keywords embedded within the web page URL which will help tell search engine spiders how to index a page.
Metadata
Behind the glamorous design of your website and the web pages within it, is a much less glamorous, and much more hidden page that describes and tells Google’s indexing spiders what is on each individual web page. These descriptions are known as the metadata, and each web page has a page title, and a meta description.
Page titles, sometimes called title metadata, tell search engines what the content of a particular web page is going to be, and a strong page title is the first step to improving the metadata of a page. This massively increases the importance of keywords because you guessed it, your page titles NEED to use them in order to stand a chance at ranking well.
The page title will be the headline visible on SERPs, as well as being visible in browser tabs, and how a page will appear when it gets linked to other websites.
The meta description is less important than the page title because this doesn’t directly influence search results and domain ratings.
All the meta description is, is an extended summary of the page title, including more detail about the web page, without being too long-winded but not too vague. A good way to look at the meta description is to think of it as a way to build credibility and attract web traffic without a search engine judging you.
In the case of either, the length is important. Too short and you’re likely not to attract new website traffic, but too long and information may be cut off. A sound length for a page title is around 65 characters, and about two sentences for the meta description, or roughly 155 characters.
Link Building
When search engines see that your page is being linked to by other websites, your domain rating will increase because you are viewed as a trusted source.
The more links to your web pages from external sites, the more of an authority within your field you are viewed as, which as part one explained, is significant in SEO.
Not all links are ‘worth’ the same, however, because every website has a different domain rating. One link from a highly reputable source, or one from a website that has a strong domain rating, is going to be worth far more than five or ten links from websites that aren’t seen as trusted sources.
In fact, too many links from websites that have lower domain ratings can actually harm you because search engines don’t view them to be trusted sources and being linked to untrusted sources doesn’t look good on your part.
Producing unbiased, accurate, and consistent content is possibly the easiest and most organic way to attract links to your site, especially from reputable sources. Traffic that finds answers to their queries and can learn something from your site is going to be a website that more people link to.
Guess what? Keywords are important within link building too! “Click here” is not going to help build your domain rating, so be descriptive within your links and tell your traffic what they’re about to click on to build credibility and improve your SEO.
Alt Tags
The final key component in improving your SEO is to make sure your images have alt tags attached to them.
An alt tag is a way of allowing search engines to interpret an image by converting it into text, thus allowing images to influence domain rating scores. Alt tags are especially useful for those viewing a web page using a screen reader, or on a browser that can’t process images.
Alt tags should be used to support the context of the page, meaning they should be using the same keywords as the text on the page and within the metadata, and unlike alt descriptions that must be slightly longer in length, alt tags rank better if they are short and concise.
Some considerations…
Here are a few final considerations for you that can further influence your domain rating:
- Your website must, I repeat, must, be optimized for mobile in order for these SEO tips and tricks to be at peak effectiveness.
- Your website must work well. Page loading speeds need to be fast. The design of web pages has to attract attention to retain traffic.
- Keyword cramming and clickbait doesn’t work. Tempting? Perhaps. Effective? No. You’re not fooling Google that easily by cramming keywords into titles and content.
- Consistency rules. Be regular with your content and don’t forget to review your SEO regularly.
- Be patient. Results won’t happen overnight.
Over two parts, you should now have a solid grasp on how you can improve your SEO to rank higher on SERPs.
If you follow these steps, you will be harnessing the power of Google and be well on your way to organically increasing your website traffic which you can convert into customers.
Still unsure what you should be doing? Visit SALVé for a free discovery call today.
