Upgrade Your SEO Practices

Upgrade Your SEO Practices: 7 Tips For Success

Technology is an ever-changing field that you really need to keep up with to stay ahead in the SEO game. Therefore, your SEO strategy and plan must always evolve otherwise you will be left behind. There are some constants that will always be a huge part of SEO. For instance, one of the most important aspects of SEO is maintaining good content and reaching potential customers. Knowing how to utilize SEO tools like social media, having a mobile friendly website, and the proper use of keywords are other important aspects that will always be important in this process.

Search engine optimization, or more simply known as SEO, is what makes your website appear higher up on the organic searches on the search engines. The higher this rank is the higher up on the page your website will appear. This is important because generally people do not go much further than the first page or two for answers to their web queries. If you are a business trying to sell a product or service, it is important to end up on the first page of the searches as this will make potential customers more likely to click on your website.

Some of last year’s methods are outdated and you will want to look into upgrading your SEO. These are some of the current and best SEO practices of 2015:

1. Avoid Meta Keywords
Meta keywords have often been a common practice in SEO. What one may not know is that Meta keywords no longer have any effect on website ranking. While the Meta tags or keywords appear during searches, they do not have any bearing on rankings. Both Google and Bing have admitted this and sometimes even flag the website as spam. This is not a worthwhile way to spend your time, so avoid using these Meta keywords.

2. Avoid Overusing Keywords
If you overuse keywords in your website, your page can come off as spammy and Google may look down on your site. Keyword targeting is important, and placement is even more important. If your keyword is “cookies”, and you use cookies 20 times in the first paragraph, you are not using keywords right. Keywords should appear naturally throughout the page, not clumped together. This affects the quality of your content, and Google will avoid placing your site among the top ranks.

3. Meta Descriptions Are Still Important
Meta descriptions, not to be confused with Meta keywords, are still an important piece to your SEO puzzle. A Meta description is where you spend just over 200 characters to convince potential customers to visit your site. This is not something you can pop in an algorithm and hope that it works out for you. Make it fun, make it enticing, and make it salesy without being too overt. If you phone this in, you will likely not draw the customers to your page.
4. Mobile Sites
A lot of people tool around on their phones, searching for local businesses that offer the services that they want. Because of this, you need to have a mobile friendly website that loads fast. For maximum results, you may want to choose a hybrid design of both a mobile and regular website. This page must load quickly, loading in under a second; otherwise you can hurt your search engine rankings, which we will get into next.

5. Faster Website
Sites like Google want webpages that load quickly because they know that we live in a time where people want instant gratification. They want to have their information quickly, and if your site is slow customers will likely leave your site quickly and move onto another one that loads quicker. This will hurt your rankings, and will lose you customers.

6. Design Matters
Imagine your website as if it were a storefront. If it is messy and confusing, customers will get turned off, and not even bother. This aspect comes in a few parts. First of all, it should be a clean and organized design, with sidebars that have links to other pages. It can be tempting to just load your webpage with all that information, but it can be overwhelming for the customer. Instead, put some key information on the main site, and add links to other pages with any additional information to lessen the clutter on the front page. Another thing to remember is to have high quality photos on your website that are related to your business. Give these photos a descriptive filename and tags with additional information. This is a good way to add keywords in a more natural way.

7. Working Links and Updated Content
These are two features that sites like Google checks for. They do not want to have users go to websites that have broken links, and Google picks up on this and it can affect your web ranking. Google also only wants to offer their users with up-to-date content so they have all the information they could need. If you have broken links on your website, fix them or remove them. As for updated content, there are a couple things that you can do. First of all, you can maintain a blog that is updated regularly. Another useful tool is to use something like a calendar of events, where you update for any special reason.