Establishing a new website is far from easy. Considering the sheer size of the internet, new businesses often have only a fraction of a chance to appeal to enough customers to actually last. As such, most new websites will just disappear into the abyss. Luckily, there is a way to make sure that your website reaches its main audience: Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short.
But what does the term SEO really mean? Nowadays, most of us use search engines like Google to look for information online. If you type a keyword into the search bar, Google automatically lists all websites that could potentially fit the query according to their relevance and authority. When applying SEO measures to your website, you attempt to ensure that Google lists your business on its first search results page. If you succeed, the likelihood of people clicking on your website is sure to increase.
Why does my website need to be on the front page? That is an easy question to answer: The more traffic your website generates, the bigger your group of potential customers will be. Let’s be honest, most people will just click on the first search result that seems fitting. And, that being the case, it is very important for your website to rank high on Google.
With just a little effort, your website can expand its online presence and reach a bigger audience. It does not matter if you are still new to SEO, just continue reading and this article will provide you with a short introduction to five of the most important SEO measures.
Offpage and Onpage SEO
There are two main categories of search engine optimization: Offpage SEO and Onpage SEO. The difference between the two is quite easy to remember. While Offpage SEO happens outside of your control, Onpage SEO is something that is within your sphere of influence and takes place on your own website. The following examples for Offpage and Onpage SEO factors will serve well to illustrate this difference.
- Links (Offpage SEO)
The relevance and authority of a website are both highly significant when it comes to the decisions Google makes regarding its ultimate ranking of search results. Google’s assessment of a website according to these factors is the result of several different evaluation methods. By tracking the number of backlinks directly referring to your website, the Google algorithm does, for example, look at the number of times other websites claim yours to be helpful. This is also the reason why Wikipedia articles very frequently rank high on Google – a lot of people place links to them.
But do take heed. While all of this may initially sound like an easy thing to accomplish, simply buying a number of low-quality links will often only serve to negatively impact your ranking. Google is able to detect whether or not the websites linking to yours are of high quality. As such, it is best to simply produce and put out good content onto your website. If your content is good, it is only natural for other people to refer back to your site.
Besides the quality of the referring websites, their relevance and authority are important as well. If a business related to yours links your content, this link is more relevant than one from a completely different business. The same holds true for authority. If a big, well-established website places a direct link to your website, it will have a particularly positive effect on your Google ranking.
Tip: As other websites are simply more likely to refer to this sort of content, facts, tutorials and statistics, generally speaking, earn your website the most links.
- Mobile compatibility (Onpage SEO)
Using Google on their phone or tablet to gain quick access to information, more and more people access the internet with their mobile devices. It has been shown that Google favours mobile optimized websites when showing results on a mobile device. And this does make sense – why should Google recommend a website likely to malfunction on the user’s device?
To make sure that your website ranks high on both desktop and mobile devices, you should work on the mobile compatibility of your website. Luckily, your website’s compatibility with mobile devices is something you can easily change and improve. The most important aspects of mobile optimization are accessible menus, a readable font size, no ads blocking the content of your site and a website which automatically resizes to fit every kind of device.
- Social media shares (Offpage SEO)
The usefulness of social media shares for SEO optimization on Google has frequently been a subject of controversy. While Google continues to claim that links from Twitter or Instagram have no effect on its evaluation of your website’s relevance, experience shows us that this is not entirely true.
Generally speaking, websites with a lot of social media shares do rank higher on Google. It is unclear whether this is entirely due to the direct links from Social Media posts to your website, but even if it isn’t: Shared content on social media generates more traffic for your website. The more people talk to their followers about content on your site, the more clicks your website is likely to receive.
Even if social media shares have no immediate influence on your search engine ranking, they will doubtlessly lead to more traffic on your site. Word-of-mouth advertising is still useful and can help you gain backlinks from other websites.
In order to boost social media shares, we suggest building a steady social media presence for your company. This will have a positive effect on the way people interact with your products and, as such, may also allow you to gain new customers.
- Page speed (Onpage SEO)
When a potential customer clicks on your website and it takes ages for the site to load, it isn’t unlikely that they will leave before even having taken a single look at the content of your website. This is the reason why the loading speed of your website is of utmost importance.
A lot of people have grown accustomed to the luxury of accessing any information, regardless of their location, in a matter of seconds. Regardless of how high quality your content is, it will hardly matter if there is no one left to see it. As such, the optimization of page speed is incredibly important. If your content loads fast on both mobile and desktop devices, people are much more likely to access and use it.
There is more than one way of checking just how user-friendly your website truly is. However, as it includesan entire section dedicated solely to your website’s performance, we consider Google Search Console to be the best tool for you to make use of.
- Complete business information (Onpage SEO)
This factor is particularly important when it comes to local SEO. The more real information about your company is available on your website, the more likely Google is to reward your site with a high position in its ranking, especially locally.
For customers to be able to recognize your company as a legitimate business that is not trying to scam them, the name, address and phone number of your business should always be available on your website. Providing this sort of information also helps with ranking higher on Google. A win-win situation, so to speak.
Conclusion
There are a lot of different factors you should take into account when optimizing your website for search engines. While there is a lot of information on the topic of SEO to be found on the internet, just diving right in can be confusing, especially for complete beginners.
If you do not know where to even start with SEO, you should consider contacting Werbepresse. They will provide you with a plethora of SEO related articles and competent help when it comes to optimizing your website, both Onpage and Offpage.