Did you know that 68% of online experience starts with a search engine? Did you also know that SEO drives 1000% plus more traffic than organic social media? The point here is that SEO is very important when aiming to gain visibility online and increase traffic.

Some websites rank higher than others on google because they put in the effort to improve the SEO of their websites. SEO is an investment, if you are aiming to rank higher on google then investing in SEO is a must to achieve such a goal.

Enhance page loading speed

“Remember that time is money” according to Benjamin Franklin. Nobody wants to spend more than 10 seconds waiting for a site to load. I’ll say that enhancing website loading speed is the first important step to improving SEO ranking on your website. Slow loading is the number one reason why any user will abandon a website before going through it. 

Google recognizes the activities that happen on a website and every negative interaction will affect your ranking on google.

Publish/Introduce relevant content

 When doing SEO marketing, publishing content is an important tool for improving SEO ranking. Relevant content and SEO go hand in hand, useful content prompts users to spend more time on your website. The sole aim of your site content should aim at your target audience’s interest, this is the only way to keep them engaged and coming for more. In the process of creating content, you must identify and target specific keywords for each content page and page title.

Better user experience

Readability and usability are key to relevant content. What makes good content is when its reader or user finds it useful and easy to understand, good content should also answer the question of the audience or meet the needs of a web visitor. SEO content can be written content, video, images, or audio, whichever it is your visitors should be able to find satisfying.

Create niche relevant backlinks

Backlinks are links from one website that connect or go back to a page on another website. One can link to your website page and you can also link to another web page from your web page. They are also known as inbound  links, I’d like to call this a referral link, backlinks say “ check out this page for more information about this topic”. The quality and quantity of backlinks added to the content of your website can help you rank higher on google search results, that is to say when you link to an authoritative website you automatically let google know that your content was useful to your visitors and also provide credibility to your content. Be careful not to distract your visitors with too many links as they may not be able to engage in your content.

Effective strategies for getting backlinks

• Do what your competitors are doing in other words, copy them.
• Find broken links within your niche, introduce your resource idea to replace them and then you get a backlink. You can use these tools to find backlinks; site checker, W3C link checker, SE ranking, and others. You can also use these search engine queries on Google; your keyword plus the link, if your niche is centered around copywriting you’ll “look up copy plus the link” or the keyword plus the resource.
• Infographics are the visual representation of data. They are popular means of gaining backlinks 
• You can also get backlinks through resource link building which is building backlinks from pages that already have curated lists of links to external websites.

Regular content updates

Nothing beats consistency in business, the more you put time, money, and effort into it the more you increase growth. Consistency builds trust and reliability, your customers will always rely on your website for valuable information about their interests, and these kinds of activities are recognized by google. Freshly updated content helps to build authority on your web page and also build domain authority.

Use alt tags

This is a critical component of web accessibility, they are available not to replace images but as an alternative, if an image cannot load and very essential for the visually impaired users using a screen reader, It gives access to the context of what an image is displaying. When attaching alt tags to your image you want to keep it short and very specific as stuffing can do damage to your SEO which will provide a poor user experience. The absence of alt tags can harm the ranking of your web page because they help search engine crawlers and improve SEO.

Metadata

The word metadata may seem quite confusing to beginners but the concept of metadata is quite simple. It is simply the information about a particular data that forms the foundation for its relationship with other data. For example, there is a file of both male and female students and their personal information and grade. When you open that file it displays just their names. Those names don’t tell you much about each student now clicking on a name will further reveal more information about that name or data. This is how metadata works. It keeps you organized and saves time. There are three main types of metadata

•  Descriptive Metadata

•  Structural Metadata

•  Administrative Metadata

Read more about metadata here. ( INSERT LINK).

Best SEO ( search engine optimization) Tools

Search engine optimization requires tools for effective and smooth running. Finding SEO tools that work best for your business is easy. A few of them are listed below;

Ahrefs

It is one of the world’s best known and most recommended Seo tools that helps to optimize a website for search engines. You can use Ahrefs to create web content and do keyword research for up to 10 search engines, identify link-building opportunities, find out what people are searching for on google, tweak technical aspects of your site content, and check estimated monthly organic search to current top ranking pages. There are a total of 6,346 companies using Ahrefs mostly in the marketing and advertising industry.

Google search console

Google console is a free tool that helps you monitor, report, and improve visibility and presence in google SERP (Search Engine Result Page) and you don’t need to have an account on google search console to appear on google search results. To get google search consoles, you have to verify site ownership and get access to all the information available on it and also make sure google can find and read your pages. 

SENRush

SENRush is an all-in-one online visibility management software that offers a wide variety of features. The Domain Vs Domain feature in SENRush allows you to compare your website with that of your competitors all at once 

KWFinder

With KWFinder, you can find the best keywords with high search volumes and low SEO difficulty. You can upload bulk keywords to be analyzed in the tool and also look up other domain keyword positioning.

Moz Pro

With Moz Pro is a software that helps you with SEO audits and competitive analysis, you can check how your competitors’ site ranking site crawl, page optimization, and kink metrics perform so you can improve yours. A good feature of this software is that it offers a 30-day free trial.