Everyone has heard of SEO or Search Engine Optimization disregarding what their job is. But let us dig more into details for when you might need to hire an SEO expert to improve your website’s presence on Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu or any other available search engine.
Mentioned above, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which means improving the rankings of your website in order for the internet users to choose your site among the others.
Well, here comes a question. Every online business owner can follow a DIY approach to improve their websites’ rankings using various methods available over the web. Are they doing right? Of course NO!
SEO divides into two main categories, the white hat and the black hat. The black hat SEO is using illegal ways like getting too much cheap backlinks, duplicate or hidden content, keywords stuffing, etc to get your site ranked while the white hat is what all the search engines like you to do.
White hat SEO is following the standards for optimizing your website based on the legal published instructions.
Let’s get back to the DIY approach. If you are aware of what search engines care about the most or what is illegal from their point of view, then you definitely don’t need an SEO expert. But if you don’t, stop doing efforts that could harm your website and hire a professional before it’s too late.
There are many factors causing your business either to win or to lose the game. All the other websites are participating in this game and according to your business category, the location you want to serve and some other elements, you are going to compete with them. Read the most important vital SEO elements below.
The most important part of a successful SEO is a strong, unique, and well-written content. You should follow coherence in what you write and your content must describe the exact topic.
It really matters that you delegate your content writing to a professional copywriter. He/she has their own references, rules, standards to create a unique content.
Writing articles could also help search engines to consider your website as a regularly updating one.
Standing for User Interface and User Experience, they are how the users see your website and what they will experience while visiting your site.
Your website’s interface is categorized under the development phase. In this phase, you normally receive a lot of design proposals from different agencies.
After choosing the right one and discussing your needs, our website design team creates a raw design for you according to your business category, your target audience, your desired colors, etc. Being approved by you, it usually takes 6-8 weeks to prepare the prototype. When we get the change list from your site, we need another 2 weeks to finish our job and hand your professional website over to you.
Website speed and conversion rate are two of the most important elements in the user experience phase.
Since most of the users are now using their cellphones to surf the web, the interface of your website must be mobile-friendly and a fast loading site should be waiting for them.
Also, it’s really important to convert the visitors into real customers, otherwise, you are losing time and money. So conversion rate optimization is also a ranking factor.
By improving your site speed you will certainly have a better chance to stay among the top competitors. A fast loading website should load in less than 6 seconds on mobile and 4 seconds on desktop.
The list of search engines’ SEO factors is longer than you can imagine. Most of them are gained during time and experience and this is the reason you should avoid the DIY approach and hire a professional SEO agency.
To be brief, some of them are listed below.
Etc.
We suggest you read about SEO factors more in Google’s article written by Google.
Search engine optimization is always changing and due to these constant upgrades, voice search optimization is one of the recent search types that users use.
Voice search performance is simple and we have talked about it recently in “the relationship between SEO and IoT” post.
Just to have an idea, consider yourself wishing to order Chinese food from the nearest Chinese restaurant near your house. But you don’t know which one is the best. You can either get your phone and start typing “what is the best Chinese restaurant near me?” or a simpler way could be calling your voice assistant device (Google voice assistant, Amazon Echo, or Apple Siri. All discussed in our blog post.) and ask it the same question.
You decide!
Our team at Sitka Digital is mostly focusing on website’s voice search optimization because there will be a larger number of users using this method in the future.
There is more information available on SEO over the web and we will try to talk about them on our blog. Stay tuned!
Whether you own a website or you wish to build one (which we can take care of), by considering that we also offer services to local businesses, call our Vancouver office and tell us what you need.
This may have happened due to several reasons. A few are listed below:
1- You may have not submitted your sitemap in Google Search Console.
2- Your website may not have enough inbound links, so indexing your website will take longer.
3- You may have not met the Google standards for SEO. These standards include performance, content, tags, etc.
4- Your website may have been penalized by Google. You can check this in the “Manual Actions” section in your Google Search Console account.
5- Your backlinks may be from low-authority domains which can harm your website and prevent it from getting ranked high.
If you are using the WordPress CMS, you can use some plugins like Yoast, Google XML sitemap, All in one SEO, etc to create your sitemap. But, you can also use HTML to make the sitemap.
XML sitemap consists of your site’s URLs including posts, pages, categories, taxonomies, tags, media, etc which you can either make them indexable/non indexable for search engines.
After creating your XML sitemap, you should submit it to Google Search Console as well as adding it to the root of your website in the robots.txt.
Since more than 50% of all the online searches will be done through voice search in the near future, you should ensure implementing the following factors on your website:
1- Increasing the website’s performance like optimizing your content for the 9th grade (or below). Make sure you are following the conherence and relevancy in writing the content.
2- Speeding up the website to reduce the waiting time for the users.
3- Making the website mobile-friendly.
4- Adding FAQ to your website. You can use the “People also ask” section of Google SERP.
5- Optimize your website and aim for “Knowledge Graphs” and “Featured Snippets”.
6- Increase your domain authority.
7- Add videos/podcast audios to your website and make sure they are indexable in search engines. The quality, content and length of the media matters.
8- Since featured snippets are dynamic and they will constantly change by Google, your website’d data should be completely up to date.
Definitely Yes!
Simply told, updating the content while you improve the data and increase the quantity, is the most important factor effective for SEO.
Content size depends on what your topic is and the main point you are trying to transfer to the readers.
Sometimes just writing 2000 words would be the ideal content users need while there is a time you might need to add more photos and videos to the content instead of text.
But, updating the content is what will definitely help your your SEO. You might have written a 50 words content initially for the website while you don’t see the desired ranking. You make the content stronger, add more photos, videos and detailed information, then you see the improvement.
