It is vital for any business to understand SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) – or at least hire someone who does – in order to best market their website and therefore their products and services online. However, with the ever-changing nature of this field, it can sometimes be hard to keep up with the latest trends. As we wait for more Google Panda and Penguin updates this year, it is now more important than ever to provide the search engines with what they’re looking for.
Here we’ve listed just a few tips for SEO which can help your agency with the site ranking.
1. Focus On Quality Not Quantity
- With Google’s Panda and Penguin changes to their ranking algorithms happening so often now, the focus of your site has to be on the quality of the content, not the quantity of keywords or links or any of the other early SEO techniques.
- If your site is primarily E-Commerce or is about your products in general, you can include quality, original content by introducing a company blog that talks about developments in your industry.
2. Consider Social Media Behaviours
- With the popularity of social media sites and the increase in people sharing their favourite blog posts, websites and articles, Google is also incorporating broader social signals into its search algorithms. No doubt in the future it will be looking at distinguishing between the qualities of social media behaviours in the same way that it distinguishes between the quality of content now.
3. Enhance Your E-Commerce Site
- Online shopping is getting more popular, and you can improve your E-Commerce site by using an easy-to-navigate, aesthetically pleasing website design, utilising ‘gamification’ methods such as creating interactive tools with rewards, and removing unnecessary clutter from the site to improve load times.
- You also need to ensure you have a well-functioning mobile version of your E-Commerce site – either as a separate design or using a responsive web layout. People are now using their mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets for more than 20% of their online shopping needs.
- Make it as easy as possible to search for items, select products, and complete the checkout procedure. Buyers want to finish their transactions in the fewest clicks possible.
- All of these things will help your E-Commerce site to stay relevant and at the top of the search engine results page.
4. Concentrate on Users Not Search Engines
- Gone are the days when you can stuff your content with keywords and phrases, trying to get them into the main copy, the title, alt tags and everything else. Google is clever – and getting more intelligent all the time – and it will realise that you’re targeting search engines instead of providing useful content to readers.
- Put the relevant keyword in your title or once in your text; there’s no need to put it anywhere else.
- It goes back to the quality of your content: providing original copy aimed at readers using a blog or similar technique will make your site seem relevant and genuine when it comes to search engines.
The primary slogan still holds true and probably always will, “Content is the King”.
