If you are hoping to have your website rank well on Google and other search engines online, you will want your website to be understood easily by indexing robots. These indexing robots are usually called “spiders” and they are the ones that scan for relevant search results. When your focus of the page is easily apparent to these search spiders and place enough keywords that search engines will consider relevant, your page will have a higher likelihood of ranking well in search results. One could easily become wrapped up in all the technical aspects of SEO that we can forget about the most important part in this whole process: the user. In order for SEO to truly be effective, it needs to resonate with both search engines and users alike. A high ranking page that will detour away users with poor content. If a person does not find your page to have valuable information they will leave your page right away, driving away valuable web traffic. We’ve decided to go over some best practices that will help make sure that your page is well received by both search algorithms and users to take your site’s SEO to the next level.
Modify Your Traditional Crawl-Index-Rank SEO Model
Crawl-index-rank is still the basics of how Google Spiders will treat your page, to really create effective SEO you will want to go one step further. Once your ideal user has got to the page you need them on, connect with them. Even if their search query is an exact match to the keywords in your content, they will be likely to bounce back out to other search results if you fail to draw them in. These lost customers could end up clicking on the pages of your competitors instead. Strong and effective content that resonates well with users and crawlers will come in handy in keeping people on your site. Having a popular search query distributed throughout your page will help crawlers determine that your page is relevant, but if it is not implemented organically within the content, your page could seem spammy, for lack of a better word, and cause users to distrust or doubt your business. It’s important to remember that users are not search engines and they are the ones who will be really looking to contract your services, so it is important to keep this from happening to your site.
Is your Media Content Understandable by Users and Crawlers?
Having relevant media content can help out a lot when it comes to improving your user’s experience on your page. Pictures or videos of your business or services are a great way to catch the attention of users. The downside is that users can obviously tell what is in an image but Google Spiders cannot understand what they are. A user would be able to look at a photo of a car and know right away that it is a car but the only way a Spider can decipher what it is in your media content is through HTML Alt-attributes and Schema. If your site’s images and videos don’t have alt-attributes or relevant schema markups, search engines will not be able to determine their relevance. Making alt-tags and schema markups a regular part of your SEO efforts will allow Spiders to index your content so that your media content doesn’t get ignored.
Know Your Audience: An Often Overlooked SEO Practice
Often times when we place too much of our focus on the technical side of SEO it can become easy to forget about just how important it is to know what your audience wants. Having a strong idea about what your searchers want to see is important and if you know what they want, give it to them. When you write content for your site you should ask yourself the following questions to ensure that they will be effective.
Who Are the Users I Want?
What Makes Them Buy?
Where Are They?
What Are Their Values?
What Do They Want?
We encourage you to keep asking yourself these questions throughout your SEO process to keep your attention focused on the users that you wish to attract. This will go a long way in making attractive content for your target audience. Always develop and write with your audience in mind. If you do that, they will be much more likely to stay on your page once they have clicked on it.
Enlist Help if you Need To
SEO can quickly become a full-time job and if you’re a business owner you won’t want to spend your evening combing through your site for ways to improve your rankings. The help of a professional SEO company can be invaluable in getting your pages to rank well and make sure you stand out among your competitors. Don’t be an analog advertiser in a digital world. Bring your marketing strategy up to date with best SEO practices, our company can help you build that digital presence that will take your business to the next level.
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