Search engine optimization is about being valuable to generate quality traffic to your website. You have two ways to generate traffic through search engines, which are organic and paid. Nothing is wrong with paid advertising if you have money to burn. But when you hire an SEO agency Brisbane, you will learn that you can outsmart your competition rather than outspend by improving your organic search ranking.
How to Get Traffic to Your Website?
When it comes to search engine optimization, your site needs to be discoverable in order to obtain traffic. If you are thinking about how to reach the first search results page of Google, do not worry. What you should be wary of is the fact that your target audience will ignore your marketing efforts if your website does not deliver their demands. With this, using an SEO agency is a key ingredient that can help make your digital success.
The SEO agency will optimize your site carefully and strategically. In general, there are more than 200 ranking factors that Google pay attention to both on-page and off-page. When their robot looks at your website, it considers different factors such as the page content, the URL, etc.
Basically, you try to optimize what you know and make your site easy for Google to index because if it cannot figure out what your site or features is about, then it is not going to prioritize your web pages.
With that, here are some things that Google loves to see on your site and are proven to increase your organic search rankings. This is also where an SEO agency can help you achieve this:
Robots.txt and Canonical Tags
Google does not like duplicate content, but some e-commerce sites have multiple links that point to the same content. Using a robots.txt file is the old way of doing this, but it comes with certain problems.
For example, you have three URLs pointing to the same information, and you have external sites linking to the same pages. If you tell Google not to index one of the websites, the crawler will not measure the links from the blocked site. Search engines came up with a solution for this called the canonical tag.
These canonical tags tell the crawler that the copy of the content with that tag is the right one, and then pass the link juice of all external links to the correct web page. Canonical tags are important for e-commerce sites that have the same information in multiple locations.
Canonical tags and robots.txt are related to the bigger topic of pagination, or how your content is distributed on multiple web pages. This step is a bit more complex but crucial in ensuring that you do not get penalized for putting duplicate content on your website.
Sitemaps
When Google tries to index your site, sitemaps are a way of telling the search engine what to expect. Google prefers to see sitemaps. If it is unable to locate one, it will crawl into your website through the available links. It means that if there is a place on your website that is inaccessible through links, without a sitemap, Google will not index those pages.
Also, Google likes to see XML sitemaps. If you want to tell Google that you are ready for indexing, you may submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. This is an excellent step for an SEO agency to do after revamping your website and is ready to go live.
Content Quality
Besides the structure and technical back end, you can rank high with the help of quality content. In the perspective of Google, good content means these things:
- Clear and easy to navigate
- Rich enough based on the current standards, including images, video, etc.
- Long enough to get the information across
- Regular updates
- Unique content
In other words, your content should be fresh, clear to read, and easy to understand. Note that Google seems to like longer content, so make longer articles to get more traffic.
Titles and Meta Descriptions
Although Google does not consider titles and Meta descriptions as ranking factors, they are essential for users who want to know what a page is about. Your titles should be under 60 characters; otherwise, Google will cut them off. On the other hand, your Meta descriptions should be 150-160 characters, describing what the page is about.
Practice writing your titles and Meta descriptions for all your web pages to help boost click-through rates in the organic search results.
Structured Markup
Have you seen some Google links that have reviews, photos, ratings, and other features? They are using structured markup, also called schema code, which is content annotations so that crawlers can understand pieces of information. For example, you may tell Google that this text is a news article, product name, review, contact information, etc. Then, Google uses this markup to build up those search results.
If you want Google to find you, structured markup is beneficial, particularly for your local business.
Mobile Friendliness
The main way people access the web today is through a smartphone. As such, Google separates search rankings depending on whether a user is searching with a smartphone or not?
Google likes websites that are mobile friendly, which means they are easy to navigate on mobile devices. Therefore, if your site is not mobile friendly, getting there must be a top priority for your SEO agency.
Site Speed
Because of the advent of the internet, the attention span of humans is only 8 seconds now. While it is not completely true, people are only a lot more impatient. Users bounce off pages fast if they do not load quickly. It is one reason why Google started to rank down pages that load slowly and rank faster-loading pages higher.
You can use a Google tool to help you measure the page speed for your website. Using SEO agency can help rank your site for both mobile and desktop, by doing ways to increase your speed.
Typically, if the fundamentals are not in place for Google to crawl your website, techniques like link building, later on, are not going to work as efficiently as they could. Make sure your SEO agency is using the right tools and to make Google love your site.
