SEO Basics You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your Website

 

If you have a website, whether it’s for informing potential clients and consumers about your business, selling items online, providing users with educational and informative content, or serving some other purpose, you want to ensure that people can find it. Most internet users will find it by typing in a search, or query, into a search engine like Google. To rank highly on the results page and thus increase traffic because more users are seeing your site, you’ll need to improve various aspects of it using a form of digital marketing called search engine optimization (SEO). Understanding SEO basics can help you improve your website.

 

Most brands and businesses choose to work alongside an experienced digital marketing agency because of how complicated the SEO discipline is. However, this doesn’t mean there aren’t SEO basics you can do to make your site a little better yourself. Here, we’ll be going over these tips and what you need to understand about SEO in order to master them.

 

The Basics of SEO

 

The first thing you need to understand about SEO is that content – written content especially – is king. Good content informs both Google and users about your website and what it offers. When this content is optimized, it makes the pages it’s on and your site as a whole much more visible. Although SEO encompasses much more than this, optimizing content and getting it to rank highly on relevant search engine result pages (SERPs) are one of the most important SEO basics you can focus on to improve your site.

 

You probably have a fair amount of content on your site already, so these tips will focus on what you can do to improve it and what you should keep in mind when writing content to add in the future. 

 

Tip 1: Give users what they want

 

At their core, search engines like Google are designed to answer questions. Users put in something they want to find or learn more about, and the search engine provides what it believes are the most relevant and accurate answers. Thus, the content on your site should be relevant and exist to inform and educate users. You should always focus on the reader and constantly ask yourself if what you’re writing will be engaging, informative, and useful to them. In short, content should satisfy their search.

 

Tip 2: Put “EAT” into all your content

 

EAT is an acronym that stands for “expertise, authority, and trustworthiness,” qualities that sum up what search engines like Google look for and want to see in website content. Content that checks all these boxes gets prioritized in SERP rankings, and by focusing on communicating your EAT in your writing, you should end up with higher quality content that is more engaging, informative, and relevant for users as well. Google values expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, and to improve your website, you should too.

 

Tip 3: Write something new

 

With just how much content there is on the internet, it might seem impossible to write something completely new or provide a new take on something. But if you implement the previous two tips into your content generation and review process, you’ll be well on your way to creating something that’s different from everything else on the internet. In addition to the written content on your site, you may also want to consider adding unique graphics design and complementary videos.

 

Tip 4: Avoid duplicating content

 

If you’ve created some unique content that you really like, you may be tempted to copy and paste it onto other pages of your website, but don’t. Or at least don’t do so without making some minor changes because Google does not rank pages with duplicate content. As a general rule of thumb, avoid having content on your site that includes 12 or more of the same words in the same order as they are elsewhere – on your website or any other.

 

Armed with these SEO basics, you should be able to improve the content on your site on your own. However, the complexities of the other aspects of SEO are often better left to professional SEO experts like the team at Social media. Contact us today to learn more about our services!