What is SEO?
SEO is the process of making the best out of your website to attain traffic that is unpaid from the search results. In other words, businesses make changes to their websites so that it attracts and fits the criteria of a good quality and relevant page to the search engine. By doing so, your website will appear as the top results to the audiences.
And exactly how does the search engine do so? The search engines will examine the website and understand what the content is about as well as how user friendly and easy to navigate through the website. The search engine will ‘score’ websites with content that are more appealing and produces a desired or intended SEO-focused result. This can increase the amount of traffic that visits the website.
What affects SEO?
There are quite a few factors that can affect the optimization and in this content, we will separate them into on and off pages optimization.
- Off Page Optimization
Off page optimization refers to the things that you do not have complete control over and has got huge influence on the good and bad reflect of your business. For a simpler understanding, it is the mentioning of your website on another platform.
1.1 Social Sharing, Likes and Dislikes
With a high quality and relevant content that your website has, it will increase the number of social actions by the audiences. These are however not controlled by you and are a factor that could determine whether your content and optimization is done in a beneficial way or lacks the desired SEO value.
1.2 Business Credibility
Inbound links, also known as backlinks are links from one website to a webpage of another website. Links are important because your business links included in another website with authority can help Google to determine the credibility of your website and boost SEO. Many businesses build trust and maintain good relationships with influencers and have them include backlinks to the business website. The reason is because these influencers create good quality web content that satisfy the SEO and can help boost your business web exposure further.
- On Page Optimization
On page optimization factors are those from within the website that you have total control of. These are factors that the business can make changes to fit the best practices of SEO-based results. Keep in mind that other than how relevance your web content is to the search engines, it also determines how user friendly the website is. Also note that you should only use white label SEO. This means no keyword spamming. No hacks like using a white font colour to blend in the rest of the background to hide SEO spamming efforts.
2.1 Speed of Page
Page speed is one of the factors ranked by Google’s Algorithm Speed. With a faster page speed, it can help reduce bounce rates as well as regular pauses on the site.
Bounce rates refers to the percentage of traffic that enters the site and then leaves without viewing any other pages from the website. This means that there are no desired actions by the visitors of the web and if speed is the reason behind this, it greatly affects the user-friendliness and may reflect bad impression on the business.
2.2 Keyword
Keywords is one of the ranking factors that Google makes use of to determine how relevant your web content is to the search query. With more relevant keywords available, it will have better rank in search results. Keywords can be placed on the web where it is clear enough for search engines to scan and read.
For example, keywords under the description or title tag can help search engines identify keywords and match relevance. However, too many keywords can be penalized so an appropriate number under each content is adequate enough.
2.3 Images
Images are quite often the overlooked factor of on page optimization that can affect how strong your SEO is. The SEO for images consist of the format file it is, the size of the image file, how fast it takes to load and any inclusion of keywords in the image file name.
Conclusion
Understanding the factors that affect your SEO is helpful in the sense that you can identify them to do changes and make improvements. The most important point is to do the best practices for search engines and ensure your content is of quality and relevance to the targeted audience. However, these implementations take time and may not happen even after a few months time. While some businesses might find it complicated to do SEO on their own, outsourcing to SEO service providers is also another consideration that can help businesses boost SEO and bring in traffic.