You’ve spent your precious time building your website and you’re proud of it! You want everyone to see it, but it is missing some things. There are no landmarks, or what you would call keywords, on the site that might help people find you. The foundation of your site, site health, is not looking so healthy. You’re missing the roads, or backlinks that lead people to your website. Even if someone were to come across your site, they aren’t sticking around with the state that it’s in. What should you do about it?
You’ve probably heard of SEO or Search Engine Optimization, but what is it? It is a vital marketing tool comprising multiple elements, and knowing what they are and how they work is the key to helping your website generate traffic. Did you know that 67% of all clicks go to the first five organic search results on Google? That’s why using SEO to build the perfect site is so important.
SEO not only helps generate traffic to your website, but also is a valuable tool for brand awareness, building relationships with your audience or customers, and putting yourself as a top business in your field on Google. Who doesn’t want to be number one? When you focus on SEO, you should be specifically focusing on your content, keywords, site health, and building backlinks. If you aren’t sure what these mean, that’s OK!
Building Content and Keywords
Your keywords, or landmarks, must be chosen carefully. You don’t want to build what others are building. They have pools and hot tubs on all their sites, but not very many have a treehouse! A huge, beautiful tree house is something people want to see and will keep coming back for. If your landmark is beautiful enough; people will build roads to your site themselves, helping you build even more traffic!
You may be asking what keywords are. They are words and phrases that your audience uses to find your online content. To bring the most traffic to your site, you should research keywords with high search rates and low competition. Content such as blogs can help bring more traffic to your website to help you achieve your goals. Always pay attention to the words you are using. What will most people search for?
One of the most important parts of your website’s SEO is building content with keywords. For your site to see traffic, keywords must be well-researched, carefully chosen, and used cautiously in your content to be effective. Less than one percent of keywords are responsible for over 60% of monthly searches. This is why getting your keywords right is so important.
Site Health
If your foundation, or site health, is falling apart, people will not stay on your site for long. When people see your site in poor condition, they move along to the next site which affects your standing on Google and all your hard work is for nothing. However, if your foundation is strong and steady, people will stay on your site and even come back to it as a resource time and time again.
When looking at the SEO of your website, one of the first things you should focus on is site health. Site health measures your site’s structure, speed, and security, by providing metrics to give you insight on how your website compares to others like it. Having a site with broken links and other technical issues gives it a lower score and makes it less likely to bring or keep traffic. By doing site audits, you can find ways to improve your website. It’s important to check on your site’s health often. Faster pages convert 20% faster on mobile devices, making your audience’s user experience more enjoyable.
Building Backlinks
The roads to your site help people find you in more ways than just through a simple search. You don’t want to build your roads through a mountain, where they are difficult to find and navigate. Bad roads are misleading to the people trying to visit your site. Nothing on the other side of a bad road can be good. You want to build healthy, stable roads that people can trust.
In SEO, backlinks are hyperlinks that take users from one webpage to another, forming the strongest referral network in online searches. When building a strong backlink, the most crucial factors are the quality and relevance of referring domains and pages. A web domain is where a backlink originates. A referring page is the page where the backlink is found. Relevant backlinks from good sites show that your page is worthy of attention. Over 65% of pages have no backlinks. The #1 result in an organic search has 3.8 times more backlinks than search results in lower positions. There are a few ways that backlinks add value to your site.
- Increased organic traffic – Backlinks are one of the leading search ranking factors, meaning that a page with good backlinks is more likely to rank higher on a Google search inquiry. With healthy roads, people will come to visit your site!
- Increased referral traffic – Links on high-traffic sites and pages lead to increased traffic on your website via that page.
- Credibility with Google – Backlinks are a sign to Google that your page knows what it is talking about because other websites are willing to link to it. Even Google is looking for trustworthy roads!
- Credibility with readers – Pages with links from well-established websites in their industry are more likely to convince your readers to come to your website. Readers trust a good road!
By building landmarks, having a strong foundation, and sound roads, you can be sure that your website will have people flooding in to see it, and coming back over and over. When you take the time to use good SEO strategies, your site will be healthy and beautiful!