Yes, your website can go from “lost in the crowd” to “first-ranking” on search engine results. If you follow through with best-proven practices and apply the right techniques, you can achieve desired results rapidly and keep your site high ranking long-term.
The topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) often comes off as a somewhat confusing, complicated, and intimidating subject. Even professionals can have a few challenges now and then. However, we have managed to put together a list of the most productive SEO friendly fundamentals. These master keys will make your site irresistible before search engines over the long-term.
BEST SEO FRIENDLY FUNDAMENTALS
Search-Terms and Keywords:
This is very much the most basic (and most crucial) number on the pile. You must carry out some research for the most popular search terms used in your niche. Also, research on the topic(s) your site will be focusing on. Keywords are beneficial for this purpose.
Generally, most site publishers will try to naturally web the keywords throughout the site’s content, on the topic, on images, and so on. This is not improper, of course. However, all that effort doesn’t score much on search engine results; so, what does? “URLs”.
URLs are the cornerstones of an efficient and effective site hierarchy. It is the first thing the search engines interact with during a search. They help search engines to locate your domain when trying to find resources for related queries. They also help to direct users to their target destinations more quickly easily. With URLs, you need to plan ahead instead of counting on making corrections in the future. Such an effort will only leave your site with endless “redirect” loops, which is no good for you, your users, or the search engines.
How to Get It Right with Keywords and URLs
PURPOSE:
Try to conceptualize each page on your domain so that every one of them has a targeted purpose. It could be informational, administrative, or transactional, and so on. The reason for its existence must be defined and clear to you and thus mirrored on the URL. This would help it to be found easily by crawlers. To achieve this, also incorporate apt keyword research and make use of relevant terms.
DOMAIN:
After successfully defining and holding the purpose of each page on your domain in your mind, or sketched out somewhere, implement it on your domain. Select the term/keyword that gets to the purpose/essence of what that page is addressing and integrate it on the URL near the root domain.
Example: let’s consider an example of a page on your domain that addresses one topic, News.
https://example.com/news
This style allows your URL to flow logically from domain to category. It will increase site visibility and make it much easier for search engines to identify them during a search quickly.
Build Solid URL Links Structure For the Future:
This means defining a site-wide URL hierarchy in such a way that it continues to fit its purpose in the future while being flexible enough to accommodate additional pages. Failure to achieve this often ends up sending confusing signals to search engines. However, well-structured links make it easier for search engines to understand how your site’s product offerings are categorized.
Following our previous example, let’s create a structured link.
https://example.com/news/nigerian-news/lagos
https://example.com/news/lagos
Here we can see that the first link flows logically, from domain to category, sub-category, to subject. The second link simply goes from domain to subject. Hierarchically, the first example will rank higher on search engines. This also makes users quickly understand what your site is all about just by looking at the URL.
To avoid errors in the future, it would be a good idea to do some research to understand the current trends of similar sites that share the same content and the direction of that niche. This would help you to conceptualize your site’s architecture and avoid future errors.
Avoid Use of Dynamic URL Strings:
Dynamic URL strings are usually harder to read by users because they integrate complex characters.
Example: https://domain.com/news/?cid=1234.
Search engines do not have any difficulty indexing or crawling either static or dynamic URL variants. However, for the sake of SEO, the static URLs are a better option because they incorporate your keywords, and they are also more user-friendly.
If your site is a victim here, you can make use of “rewrite rules” especially if you are using a web server that runs Apache. Tools like “Generate It” offer a lot of help. Several other tools and platforms offer different solutions for other complex problems.
Share Premium Quality Content:
After considering all the on-site fundamentals, it is time to look at the content of your website. You can employ the services of professionals from sites like Online Writers Rating as this naturally affects your site’s SEO ranking. If your site does not have standard content after all the hard work in the URL section, you will end up with a unique URL or domain whose content is not indexable by search engines.
You must also try as much as you can to make sure that your site is free of any form of duplicate content. This will warrant SEO penalties. It will also impact your SEO ranking severely.
Another thing to consider on your site is Images. Images play a subtle but significant role in their contributions to your site’s overall SEO ranking. You can take advantage of this by merely changing their descriptions. For instance, on our news website, Instead of “image234.jpg,” we should rename it to “news.jpg.” This simple action will help the images on our news site to appear more rapidly in image search results. It will, of course, increase the site’s ranking on search engines and drive more traffic to the website.
Include an XML Sitemap:
A site map goes on to help search engines understand what is going on in your site. This way, the search engines can quickly resort to your website whenever there is any related query.
There are two kinds of sitemaps, the XML and HTML sitemap. The first is useful to search engines, while the latter is designed to help human users navigate through your site more easily. It also has other uses as well.
In simple terms, an XML sitemap is simply a list of the URLs you submit to search engines. They typically contain a list of the URLs that make up your site.
A sitemap is useful for two primary purposes:
- It will help search engines locate your site’s pages more quickly and easily.
- It serves as a reference for search engines when selecting a preferred canonical URL for your site.
Since you are responsible for submitting the URLs for the sitemap, the question therefore is, which URLs should you submit? For the best SEO results, experts recommend that you submit only the URLs that you want to appear on the search results. Less is more.
You can make a comprehensive list of your site’s URLs in the HTML sitemap.
Conclusion
Most site publishers often put in a lot of effort into other factors without considering the most important one being the site’s URL. Being the first thing that interacts directly with the search engine, you should give URLs a lot of concerns first. When this is done, it gives room for other factors to be handled with ease and results in very high SEO ranking results.
About the Guest Author
Tiffany Porter has been working as a Chief Writer at Online Writers Rating reviewing a variety of writing services websites. She is a professional writing expert on such topics as digital marketing, blogging, design. She also likes traveling and speaks German and French.