SEO is such a key component when setting up and building a website online, this includes new domains and older domains.
Without a strong SEO strategy your website can often become lost on many SERPS. However, a strong SEO strategy can allow a website to grow. Which results in a high number of impressions, along with a growth in clicks over time.
Now the key to SEO is patience from your side, along with high quality content, crawl ability and good backlinks.
So, lets get into how to rank higher using SEO.
Search Engine Optimisation is the act of ensuring your website will perform at its best. This is by ensuring the website can be crawled, index and ranked, through relevance, crawling and backlinks.
All these steps ensure that a search engine can find your website, and present it to a relevant audience to your post, page or image.
Relevance
If your website is relevant to the keyword, which you have targeted and researched. Then you stand in a good position for a search engine ranking you in a high ranking position.
When I say relevance, I mean that your content should reflect what you are selling/knowledge at. Which means that the users will gain an insights and information, that is helpful. For example, if you run a services website for moving goods, you will target a keyword such as cheese transportation UK. This keyword helps to define what content to right for. If you use the keyword in a correct format and make sure landing page content is relevant to cheese transport. Along with a blog post talking about how to do so, always helps.
Relevance also includes the keywords we use, this is due to the keyword being the most important part of the content written. The keyword is often researched at the start of the project, this means the content can be careful developed. This is to ensure the keyword is used often enough, which allows Search Engines to crawl and rank the website.
Crawling
When you create a new website, web page, or post that new blog. You must ensure your website is going to get crawled by Search Engine bots. This allows for your website to gain more ranking ability with search engines, which helps in the next stage when ranking. But will also help when it comes to Search Engines knowing what type of content it is, and can read the page to ensure the content is relevant.
The first way to ensure a website is crawled is through a robots.txt file. This file says which types of bots are allowed to crawl your website. For example Google can have certain urls that can be ignored by these bots.
Following the robots file, we have sitemap, which structures the page so Search Engines can see how many urls, which urls are the most important. With a solid structure you allow each page has an equal chance of ranking for its own keywords.
If we have both a robots.txt file, and a sitemap, this gives a website the best chance of ranking higher in each step. However, we must still ensure that our content is relevan, follows good SEO principles. Along with a good content marketing strategy.
Ranking
Ranking is when Search Engines can crawl a website. Then search engines decides the content on your page is of a good standard, relevant and gives the user something to engage with. Google will then decide your page should be ranked. Which includes: where and how authoritative your website is.
When it comes to ranking patience is best. However, we still need to ensure that we provide our users with great content, that is informative, whilst giving the user an insight into what you do. However, sometimes content can often seem tailored to search engines, rather than for the user. This often means that yes you can get a high rank. Although, this can cause users to leave your page quickly (bounce on and off). So, whilst ranking is the number on objective, ensure that users can engage with the content, learn and understand the posts, webpages and the flow of the website.
Backlinks
I feel this blog post needs to mention backlinks, however, they can often be helpful depending on the content, your post and how new your website is.
Backlinks often take a long time to curate, contact and have on your website. Backlinks are when another website decides they like your content, and will provide a link to your website, this can build authority with search engines, allows more robots to see your content, and more users will click the links.
However, with a new website trust is limited, so I recommend using PPC advertising (which will talk about in the next post) as they will build the trust in the meantime.
Conclusion
With every step we have discussed today, we recommend you get your website so that bots can crawl it. However, if your content is not relevant, written for bots or not informative. Make sure that you improve this content. Following this content your should be able to get ranked within 6 months on a high spot.
When it comes to making your website authoritative, ensure that your find high quality backlinks, from sources you trust. This will then allow for a higher rank in keywords with a high difficulty.
All these steps help to grow a business online. Hope this helps.