5 Handy Search Engine Optimization Tips

Optimizing your website for search engines is an important factor in organically increasing the number of visitors to your blog, online business, or service. Here are five handy search engine optimization tips from Scribendi:

1. Research those keywords

The first of our search engine optimization tips should be your first step in the SEO process. To understand how people find all that great content you post, you need to know what words they're plugging into search engines that best describe the content on your site. Ask yourself the following questions:

What product or service do I offer?
What are the most frequent topics I discuss in blog posts?
What common words am I using in my URL, HTML tags, and content?

Make a list of the most relevant words and phrases that you feel people use to search for your website content. Search these terms yourself and check out your competition. Use SEO tools, such as the Google Ads Keyword Planner, to research how these keywords perform, and decide on primary keywords that will work best to describe your website.

2. Focus on your content

Another factor that ranks high on our list of search engine optimization tips is creating great content. This is, after all, what search engines use to rank search results in terms of relevancy to keywords. Your content should be original, well-written, and updated frequently, and it should make use of the important keywords you researched. When writing your content, be sure to focus on using the primary keywords that you chose wherever it is appropriate to do so, but remember to keep the language natural. Submitting your content to a search engine optimization editing service can help you accomplish optimization and avoiding keyword stuffing, which search engines don't appreciate and can easily pick up on.

3. Double check that your HTML is SEO-friendly

Search engines use data from certain tags to rank the relevancy of a website based on keywords. Make sure your primary keywords appear in your main headings, meta description, and title tags. It is also important to place keywords within your anchor text because search engines place high priority on these keywords. Your keywords should be prominent in your meta description because this is what search engines use to index your site and it's also the information that appears below the main link in search results, which entices visitors to your website.

4. Links lead to website visitors

Linking is extremely important, and our list of search engine optimization tips wouldn't be complete without it. Inbound links tell a search engine that your website is relevant and worth ranking on search results pages. Extra weight is given when inbound links come from .edu or .gov sites because these links essentially advertise the legitimacy of your online content. The same goes for reputable sites with high search engine rankings. Asking other people to link to your page and creating your own link page to keyword-relevant external content can help you optimize your website for SEO. Just remember to avoid huge lists of links because this can work against you.

5. Use images wisely

Images and video can help a website rank higher on a search results page. Linking all images on your site increases the chances of this because, as we stated above, search engines love links. Always include your keywords in the alt image tag so that the search engine has even more information to use when ranking the relevancy of your site. Be careful not to overload your content with images that take a long time to load because fast load time is another factor that search engines look at. When it comes to videos, consider using YouTube to your advantage, and link back to your main website from your YouTube video.

There is a lot to SEO, but following these five handy search engine optimization tips can increase traffic to your website and make your online business or blog more visible in the highly competitive online world.

Image source: Tookapic/Pexels.com