Follow the Perfect SEO Recipe to Serve a Perfect Website
Like trying to cook a new dish, launching a new website can be a scary process for any webmaster or business owner. Your website is a smooth mixture of many ingredients which you must mix all together in the perfect quantities and qualities. If you forget to add all of the proper ingredients, your dish does not taste right. The same goes for your website, forget just one ingredient and your website does not look, feel or work right. You need among other items, good fresh content, but if you forget to add the SEO ingredients (correct metadata in the correct amounts as one example), then your site will not work well and/or be found online. Sometimes it is that one ingredient that seems to make or break a dish. Well, SEO may be that one ingredient that if it is left out, breaks a website.
Preparing your Website’s SEO Ingredients
So what SEO ingredients should be in your website recipe? Of course you would always want to check your cookbook for the proper ingredients (HINT: Google Algorithm = Cookbook). Don’t forget to follow up with Google updates and change your SEO strategy/recipes accordingly in order not to be penalized by Google and ensure your website works well and is tasty and findable. And you want to always measure ingredients (HINT: Analytics). Use SEO tools like Google Analytics and extract weekly reports to track your measurements and performance.
I think there are three basic SEO ingredients your website recipe can’t be served without:
1. On Page
- Quality “Content”: Google cares a lot about how good your content is. Their first concern is to provide quality content for users looking for a specific topic. So when their users search for something and the SERPs deliver spammy or low quality content, Google will lose its credibility and so will you.
- Optimized “Meta Data”: Neither Google nor users will recognize a page without important information such as Title, Description and Keywords. You need to describe what your page is talking about for both crawlers and users. So by default when the crawler sees that your webpage talks about X, it will return the result in the SERPs displaying the appropriate information. Crawlers and users will appreciate the consistency between meta data and web content and this will increase the SERPs for your site and visitors.
Friendly “URL” Structure: One of the most basic search engine optimization techniques is using SEO-friendly URL structure. Good structure can help your website in the indexing process. Example:
Dynamic URL: https://www.companyname.com/products/items.php?id=x&model=y&variety=z
VERSUS
Static URL: https://www.companyname.com/x/y/z.html
2. Off Page
Off page optimization is doing things off site to improve your website rankings. Back Linking is one of the best things you can do off site to increase your website’s rankings by building up more links. You should have an off page strategy for your website in order to gain visibility for your website.
A successful off-site SEO strategy will generate the following benefits to website owners:
- Increase in rankings
- Increase in PageRank
- More exposure
3. Social Media
Real marketing comes from real connections with your target audience and Social Media is the only off page channel that will let you do this. Through Social Media you can send out your business marketing message and the consumer receives it. With Social Media you can actually have a conversation. Social Media helps to create a community of fans and followers that see you as more than just a business entity. They’ll view you as someone they trust, and people buy from those they trust. Some definitive benefits of social media marketing include:
- Increased traffic
- Generated leads
- Improved search ranking
- Reduced marketing expenses
- Increased exposure
- Developed loyal fans
- Provided marketplace insight
- Grew business partnerships
- Improved sales
Some Spices and Sprinkles that would tingle your Recipe
- Publish a press release every time you have a new achievement or expanding
- After launching your website check your meta data one by one
- Submit your site map in order to fasten the indexing process
