Search Engine Optimization or better known as SEO for abbreviation is important for online visibility. Throughout the lifetime of search engines, Google algorithms have slightly changed to make relevant content stand out. We will go over the latest SEO techniques that are garnering the attention of search engines like Google and Bing. To start off, you need to have access to WordPress, Magento, Shopify or any other content management system you’re using. Content management system or better known as CMS for abbreviation is a computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content. Most likely, the people using CMS normally work inside the content or marketing department. Now that we have access to CMS, the next phase of this article will go over the important SEO techniques and negative techniques that impact online visibility.
SEO Quality Content and Readability Techniques
Although word count is not a factor that influences SEO, the content should be relevant, original, and high-quality. Therefore, the content should answer questions, be precisely relevant to the target search query, contain images and videos, and infographics. Readable content is also a huge factor considering the impact it has on readers. Readers can be turned away by content that has lengthy sentences and long paragraphs. With WordPress, Yoast SEO plugin will give you a benchmark for SEO and readability scores.
Most of the content on the 1st page of Google have high quality content that’s readable which is why they rank high. However, you should keep in mind that keyword difficulty is an important factor that goes into ranking content. Keywords that have a higher score between 0-100 will have a difficult journey to ranking high on search engines. All in all, you should start with SEMrush or Ahrefs to find content target keywords that will be easier to rank when you’re starting off.
Images and Videos for SEO Techniques
Images are some of the useful and easiest ways to make your content rank on Google. For better or worse, you cannot go wrong with images as long as they are relevant to the content. Infographics are becoming the perfect combination to create the perfect message that doesn’t overwhelm readers and visitors. As a result of infographics, your audience will stay on the pages longer to analyze the infographics and get a new perspective.
While YouTube is a popular social media, it’s also great for adding the HTML embedded into the content of the article. This may be a bias answer but the impact videos make on the content is a popular choice for many. The latest article by lemon light proves that videos on your websites can improve your SEO efforts. Most importantly, YouTube is owned by Google and that’s why its a favorable algorithm if you include their videos on your website. Below is an embedded YouTube tutorial video that helps you with embedding YouTube videos onto Magento CMS.
Internal and External Link Building
Internal links are links within the content that are linking to another page of your own website. For example, my first article post was about the impact that social media has on digital marketing strategies. As you can see now, I have linked “social media has on digital marketing strategies” to my article which is an internal link. Internal links help Google find, index and understand all of the pages on your website.
On the other hand, external links improve your SEO because Google will look at your content favorably especially if your links are high quality pages and are credible. External links are just like references that you probably used in your college papers. There are countless of websites that rank organically and those are the ones that get linked to other high websites. Additionally, the external links you do use on your websites count as a backlink to the owner. Normally, webmasters would go to trial and error to write a guest post on a website to build backlinks. However, when someone does it for them then it’s considered a huge win.
Target Keyword in Headlines, Meta Descriptions, Permalinks, and Content.
Most fundamental on-page optimization SEO techniques are the ones that take less time. Let’s start with headlines, you want to include a target keyword you want to rank for in your H1, H2, H3, and so on. These headlines usually give an overview of what the paragraphs are about. Next, you want to include your target keyword inside the meta description. Including the keyword inside the meta description is important for readers to find out what your content is all about.
As a definition, meta description generally informs and interests users with a short, relevant summary of what your page is about. Slug is an editable part of the URL of a page and these whole URL is called a Permalink. It’s important to ensure that your target keyword is showing up on the URL of every page you post. Below is a picture of the slug and meta description. As you can see, the selected keywords are included in both parts of the Yoast SEO.
Last but not least, you need to have the target keyword within the content. Back when SEO and the internet was new, the stories of using the selected keyword (both visible and invisible) were abused in order to rank high on Google. Ultimately, Google caught up with overusing the number of times you can use the target keyword. Nowadays, you have to have quality content that supports the keyword in order to rank high on Google.
Optimize for Voice Search Optimization
Once again, this is becoming a popular choice for many since a lot of people use their voices to look up results on Google. Therefore, the easiest way to rank with voice search is by targeting questions keywords and long-tail keywords. Using conversational language will make a greater impact to rank your content so it shows up on voice search. Answering the question can help your content appear in feature snippets which is helpful for appearing on voice search. There are more SEO techniques to rank your website for voice search in this Hub Spot article. For what it’s worth, voice search has been around for several years now. Most likely, you or someone you know uses Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant for voice search.
Will AI Impact SEO?
The impact AI can make on SEO will be helpful for many companies. Most of all, the benefits of Chat-GPT writing content will make it easier to create written content. To make it clear, we did not use Chat-GPT to write this article but it was tempting to say the least. Can it optimize the content and include on-page optimization techniques that we have went over in this article? From what I have seen, I don’t think so but we can see big changes in the near future that will perform SEO tasks within a few seconds. With AI, there are shortcuts but people will still be available to do the hard work of writing readable content that won’t sound like a robot.
Bad SEO Techniques to Avoid
Nowadays, a lot of content creators on CMSs are using black hat SEO techniques to get ahead. Unfortunately, the negative consequences of using black hat SEO techniques can ban your website from Google and other search engines. Your competitor can report you or Google can find you guilty of buying links or link manipulation. Ultimately, this will set you up for failure and getting your website up and running will be a long journey. You are better off going with a digital marketing agency that cares has great experience with SEO techniques like My Digital Marketing Help. Book a call with us today to schedule a 15, 30, or 60 minute meeting to discuss ways we can help you rank high on Google.
