What is SEO?
SEO is the essential term used for methods you can use to increase the visibility of your website on search engines (search engine result pages)
There are multiple methods, from technical practices to promotional approaches, that you can use to raise your site's visibility.
Why do you need SEO?
Building the site architecture and providing easy navigation will help search engines index your site fast. This will also provide visitors with a good experience of using your site and encourage repeat visits. It's worth considering that Google and other search engines are increasingly paying attention to user experience.
What are search engines looking for?
1) Relevancy
Search engines try to provide the most relevant results to a search query, whether it's a simple answer to the question “how old is Sachin?” (The answer of which Google will likely provide without you having to leave the SERP) to more complicated queries such as “what is the best chicken restaurant nearest to me?”
Search engines provide these results down to their internal algorithms, which we'll probably never truly determine. Still, there are factors that you can be confident will influence these results, and they're all based around relevance. For example, a searcher's location, search history, time of day/year, etc.
2) The quality of your content
Do you regularly publish helpful, valuable articles, videos, or other types of media that are popular and well produced? Do you write for actual human beings rather than the search engine itself? Well, you should. The latest research from Searchmetrics on ranking factors indicates that Google is moving further towards longer-form content that understands a visitor's intention as a whole instead of using keywords based on popular search queries to create content.
Stop worrying about keywords and focus on the user experience.
3) User experience
There are many SEO benefits for providing the best possible user experience. You need an easily navigable, clearly searchable site with relevant internal linking and related content. All the stuff that keeps visitors on your webpage and hungry to explore further.
4) Site speed
How quickly your web pages load is increasingly becoming a differentiator for search engines. Google may soon start labeling results hosted on Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP), so this may be the ‘mobilegeddon' of 2016. Speaking of which…
5) Cross-device compatibility
Are your website and its content equally optimized for any given screen size or device? Bear in mind that Google has stated that responsive design is its preferred method of mobile optimization.
6) Internal linking
We've talked about the benefits of ensuring your site has straightforward and easy-to-use navigation. Still, there's also a practice that editors and writers can carry out when publishing articles to help push traffic around the site, and that may lead to higher trust signals for Google: internal linking. (See what we did there.)
7) Meta descriptions and title tags
Having a meta description won't necessarily improve your ranking on the SERP. Still, you should use it before publishing an article as it can help increase your chances of a searcher clicking on your result.
TBA offers Search Engine Optimization services based on these needs. You can reach out to us through tba.ai
