The search engines use a number of factors to determine the importance of a site or webpage, such as links, title tags, keywords used, and much more. To get the best results your website otherwise may not receive, you have to do your best to optimize your site to maximize your SEO efforts.
Search engine optimization is more crucial than ever before due to online shopping exploding. It’s estimated that the global online retail trade is projected to increase by 60% between 2019 and 2023, and by more than 50% between 2019 and 2030. This trend reflects that search engine optimization is becoming an increasingly important component of the marketing mix.
While SEO is important enough that it will affect the success of any business, it is best to understand SEO in its most basic form before working toward more advanced aspects. All too often, business owners compete or even head down the road to compete on the basis of SEO title cards, with competitors creating accounts and titles solely based on keyword research. This widespread practice has children playing search engine games like Words With Friends, One Title, and many other types worthy of their own article.
It is not too late to understand the importance of a solid SEO foundation. While research may seem intimidating given the scope many of these topics, understanding keywords and optimizing them for search engines is one of the easiest bits of the SEO puzzle. While it may seem like an overwhelming topic, once you’ve really understood terms and how they are important to search engines, you can work toward more advanced searches anytime you have an audience.
A website will receive more traffic as it is optimized to achieve a higher rank, which if your site is not up to date with those terms, can be a hindrance to keyword popularity. But an outdated site will receive lower, less relevant traffic. As a result, in order to be effective with SEO, it’s recommended to always maintain a website up to date with the most important terms being used and include them on your site’s pages to maximize your traffic or return on investment.
Are you trying to get more traffic to your site? Consider automating some of your content by adding callouts to some of your content. Consider using Google’s Advanced Page Rank (page ranking) and optimizing your content by incorporating the most optimized snippets when they are available. Integrate some of the most effective SEO tools to do a comprehensive keyword research, site audits, and optimize your content.
There are many terms that are commonly associated with SEO — keyword research, keyword density analysis, site audits, use-testing, and content writing. A simple SEO audit, presented in post and originally published on msnbc.com, is a simple yet effective tool to perform Google searches on your website to see how well your website performs on Google.
Before going into the nitty-gritty of what an audit or test is, let’s first go through an overview of the basics. By understanding SEO, you can improve your website or web page from search engines, increasing traffic to pages who search for what you have to offer. Google (googles, google, search, searc, g), and other search engines use a file called a website sitemap to help with keyword research. When you upload a new page to your site using a website builder, especially WordPress, you’re given a sitemap that tells Google what to expect and what it should look like. This is important to know about because without knowing what your site’s sitemap looks like, you’ll have trouble figuring out if your site is ranking high on Google. SEO audits or test (also referred to as site audits or testing, but we’ll stick to the term SEO audit) are just like a Google search for your website. The general idea is to perform a Google search on your site to see how well your site scores on the main Google search — Google Maps. You can perform multiple audits, but the best way to perform an audit on your site is to create a keyword list and an anchor text list.
For your keyword list, you’ll want to use the most productive keywords that your content is optimized for. Anchor text is any text other than a website URL that Google or any other search engine might crawls. Google analyzes those keywords when they’re typed into a Google search and determines the relevancy of the search result. To perform an SEO audit, you simply need to fill out the necessary tools for the destination site (if you’re a new user, this will likely be listed on the site header). Next, you log into your site analyzer of choice, such as SEMRush or Moz, and run a simple search on your keyword list and any anchor text you’ve included. You want to see, as you can see in the image, how the Google search will interpret keywords and the text associated with them before you upload them to your site. Once you’re done, save your report, and then you can upload the keyword list and anchor text to your site.
