3 Ways to Turbocharge Your SEO

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If you’ve recently launched a website, you probably know how hard it is to drive traffic to your website from Google and other search engines. You may have heard about “search engine optimization” and found online tutorials even more confusing.

In this article, I’ll explain the three pillars of search engine optimization (SEO) you need to understand as a business owner. I’ll also provide actionable tips to help you get started, at little to no cost to you.

3 Ways to Turbocharge Your SEO
Table of Contents

Discoverable content

Search engines won’t return your website in their search results if your content is off-limits to them. Here’s a simple way to check that your content is discoverable.

  1. Open your website in a desktop browser, and right-click to “View Page Source” (in Chrome). This will reveal the HTML code behind your webpage. This is the content that search engines like Google parse.
  2. Search the page for “noindex”. Ideally, your search should return nothing at all.
  3. If the word “noindex” appears, reach out to your webmaster to remove it.

Next, it’s also a good idea to create a sitemap to help search engines discover your content. A sitemap is a file that lists the pages on your website you wish search engines to include in their results. This article explains how you can go about creating one.

Alternatively, help search engines discover your content by linking to it from your website. For example, include links in the navigation, footer and ideally within each webpage, as search engines are known to place more emphasis on contextual links.

To check whether or not your content appears online, run the following search on Google, Bing or Yahoo: search “site:example.com”, where example.com is a stand-in for your website’s name. This will return the number of pages that each search engine has indexed. If the search returns no results, you’ll need to focus your efforts on getting your website indexed.

SEO inscription

Relevant content

Now that your content is discoverable, you need to make it easy for search engines to understand what it’s about. This will make it possible for your content to appear in their search results for relevant searches. 

Web pages: include important keywords in the web page’s title. The title is the one that appears in your browser’s tab. It also appears in search engine results. The title should also appear on the page itself in the header (typically encapsulated in <h1>…</h1> HTML tags).

Images: search engines cannot process images directly. Instead, they’ll parse the image’s alt tag for clues as to the image’s content. Add meaningful alt tags to your website’s images. The alt tag is shown to users when images cannot load, as well as to users with screen readers.

Videos: search engines cannot process videos directly either. Instead, include a full or partial transcript of important videos. This will help make their content discoverable.

Authoritative content

Now that you’ve made your content discoverable and easy to understand, you need to ensure it’s perceived as authoritative. The more authoritative your website, the higher Google and other search engines will rank it in their results. In turn, this will help drive more traffic to your website and grow your business.

Search engines don’t communicate openly about ways to grow your website’s perceived authority. However, it has become apparent, over time, that they consider both the number and quality of third-party websites linking to yours.

Your backlink profile will grow organically over time as people discover your content and link to it spontaneously. This is also why it’s important to create high quality content that users will want to share with friends and family. You could create infographics to convey information in a visual way, videos, animations or other forms of curated content. For example, the TrustedBrokers.com comparison service has created a list of free trading webinars that’s updated monthly.

If your website is new, it’s a good idea to submit it to relevant web directories, or local listings (if your website has a geographic focus). You could also look into releasing a press release to raise awareness about your service and build links to your website. Over time, you could grow your backlink profile by engaging with others through forums and blogs in your vertical.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization is more art than science. However, the three steps outlined in this article will help your website rank in search engine results for searches that matter for your website. Unlike paid digital advertising, SEO takes time to deliver results, anywhere between months and even years. However, it has the potential to significantly grow your business by delivering a steady stream of users over time, at no cost to you.

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