4 Key “Ingredients” for effective SEO

SEO might seem to be difficult, but it is not though! It is how you use the key “ingredients” while performing SEO for your website. Below are the 4 elements but SEO is not limited to these 4 elements but many more which we will come through in later blogs, but these four are the primary ones.

Four fundamentals to be implemented:

1. Technicalities of your website

2. Content

3. On Page Optimization

4. Off Page Optimization.

Explaining the points in details:

1. Technicalities of website: By this, I mean - your website should be easy for search engines to be crawled / indexed. There are different things to be taken care of for this:

• Mobile usability: Website should be mobile friendly as users are browsing more on their mobile phones than computers. It is likely that the user might leave your website if it is not mobile friendly.
• Speed: Not only should your site be mobile friendly but it should be quickly while loading. Users can leave your website if the website takes more than 5 seconds.
• Technology: By Technology, I mean your website should be search engine friendly - either if its a website being coded or a CMS based website.
• Crawling / Indexing: - Website might be a coded one or a CMS (Content Management System) based website, if its a coded one then it is important that the website’s important information is readable as text while search engines read or crawl your website. Images / Videos are important but the important stuff should be text - based. In case of CMS based websites like Wordpress / Shopify etc - the software ususally takes care of this.

2. Content:

As it is rightly said - “CONTENT IS THE KING” - and it’s true to be honest. Your website should convey everything about your business - where it is, why others should use you or your business services & many more. This helps customers to gain confidence in your business.

To break it down further - your website should have content related to these mentioned below:

•  Content for describing your business / service: Your website should convey everything about what business type you are in, where it is, why users / customers should be a part of your service etc.
• Content for building goodwill / credibility: Building credibility for a business is very important as customers will always look for services who have a good reputation. So, Testimonials / Reviews play an important role in this process. One who owns a business should always ask their loyal / happy customers to leave some reviews for your services on Google / Yahoo / Facebook / Yelp / Your Website etc. As these Reviews are also scanned by search engines and this heavily affects website ranking on search engines.
• Content for Marketing: This is important for marketing you - your business in front of your prospective customers at the early stages.

To summarize

All these three types of content are important but usually credibility content is given the least importance in the organic SEO process. Each one has its own importance and they go hand - in - hand.

3. On Page Optimization

Your website should be well optimized for ranking at the top on search engines. Some key focus areas that one needs to keep in mind in terms of their website are as follows:

• UI / UX: It’s important for your site to be easy & user-friendly to navigate through for users.

• Research Of Target Areas: List down which areas your business needs to target. This also includes knowing who your competitors are in that area you are willing to project as you want your business to rank above your competitors.
• Keyword Research: That’s basically understanding who your audiences are, where they are and what are their preferences, understanding their online behaviours etc.
• Title Tags: Your Title of the webpages within website should be descriptive & unique. Use keywords describing the page naturally.
• Meta Descriptions: Meta descriptions should be crafted in a such a way that it drives traffic to your website. Check the below screenshot of the meta descriptions show up in Google Search.

• Descriptive Content: Include text contents in your webpages which also includes the keywords and services describing your business.
• Descriptive URL: The URL of your webpage should be descriptive (describing your web page), simple and easy.
• Call Of Action: There should be strong call to actions within website as this leads to conversion and increase in sales. It should define where the user is supposed to be directed next or he knows what needs to be done next.
• Importance of header tags (h1 - h6): Header tags in your webpage are given more importance than the rest of the content when your site is being crawled. So, use header tags wisely within your site to give more importance to certain topics / keywords etc.
• Some other key focus areas: There are many other factors you need to look into like giving an ‘alt’ attribute to your images used on website. It describes the what the image  is all about. Next, is giving title attribute to your hyperlinks, which also describes what the hyperlink is all about etc.

4. Off Page Optimization

As the name says it: “Off-Page” - that is not within webpage but outside the website. So, by Off-page Optimization we mean - link building strategies. Link building (authority building) is itself a huge topic which we will come across in later blog but to simply put it - link building is an activity where other websites link back to yours…. When other websites to be precise relevant sites link back to yours - it signals the search engines that your site is worthy to be indexed.

But this needs to be done correctly as we want relevant sites to link back to ours and not any irrelevant site / directory linking to ours.

As it is rightly said:

“Connect what should be connected” - By Late Eric Ward