While keywords are a very important counterpart for your SEO it is also important to use other aspects of what makes up a good SEO strategy to market to your niche audience, here is why. With the growing number of users online, and search engines constantly updating their algorithms to best serve these users it is highly important to stay up to date with your SEO strategy to make sure you are engaging your focus in the correct areas.
What Should I Be Highlighting Other Than Keywords?
As many SEO experts are already aware, in addition to having good keywords on your site it is very important to regularly produce original and unique content. Why is this important? It is simple, you can be penalized if you don’t. If you use anyone else’s content this will cause your site’s ranking to lower and duplicate content can lead to copyright infringement which could involve some pretty hefty legal troubles if not cautious. There is a pretty good way of publishing your content without having to worry about these consequences. This involves using subheadings and using specific long tailed keywords to reach the user’s queries. What is also recommended is to use fresh new images on your site. Using images which have been produced by your business and accompanying them with ALT Text will attract users to your site. Alt Text essentially gives a brief description to your users about what is contained in the images.
Did You Know Your Internal Links Matter More Than You Think?
Where you place your internal links on your site is very important. Don’t just add internal links across your navigation bar, use your content to include internal links on your site. This will only benefit your business and help you rank better. By distributing your internal links strategically, you can manage what pages on your site you want to rank higher and have surpassing views from users. Remember to use you no index no follow on pages that you don’t hold much priority to and include category and tags to redirect these pages.
Your Site Speed Counts
Statistically speaking it takes 15 seconds to catch a user’s attention, sites that take 3 seconds or longer to load means that they will have a larger bounce rate so it is important that your site is up to speed to make sure you don’t lose users before they even get to your page. Search Engines have put so much emphasis on this they even made it a ranking factor. Not only will you lose out on users on your page and gain a higher bounce rate but you will also rank lower on google. There are many resources that can help you check your site speed and fix it so this is not an issue.
Social Media Presence is Essential
At last, we have reached one of the most used forms of communications surrounding our technology driven decade, and that is your social media platforms. Using social media platforms like Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter to name a few not only drives traffic to your site but is a good way of pushing link sharing to your site.
Making your Site Mobile Responsive
In 2016 this focus area is basically a giveaway, most individuals are on the go making it very important to have a mobile responsive site. It is also a ranking factor you definitely want to address. Last year google made a huge emphasis on the mobile search algorithm. To provide a better experience for mobile users they made it a point to address mobile specific searches as these searches are surpassing desktop searches.
All of these focus areas guarantee to drive traffic to your site if used correctly and efficiently. There is much more to SEO than keywords and applying these factors on a consistent basis will only help your site.