Entrepreneurship and
Many small business owners and entrepreneurs may feel uneasy and helpless when it comes to
Running a business without
We all know, startup entrepreneurs are busy people and they have a very limited time to explore something new. However, what if
Therefore, we created this list of 5 productivity
Though, before going to those, one must understand that organic ranking is the collective result of 200+ different
Let’s jump in at the deep end now.
SEO Metadata Optimization
While
Before optimizing the Metadata, entrepreneurs must have a good list of relevant and topical keywords. Hence, in order to succeed at
- Page Title
The Page Title is one of the powerful ranking factors for search engines. When optimizing a page title, one should place the most powerful topical keyword at the beginning of it. The Page Title is limited to 70 characters – so, descriptive brevity is the key.
- Meta Description
The Meta Description is not only important for ranking, but it also influences searchers to click on the website on the search engine result page. Placing a couple of relevant keywords in the 150-character Meta Description while keeping it human-friendly is the way to go.
- Meta Viewport
The Meta Viewport tag is important for mobile responsive websites. This tells browsers how to control the webpage’s width and scale to make it fully responsive and accessible on different mobile devices and screen sizes.
- Robots
Meta robots are used either to block a page from being indexed by search engines or to block the link-juice flow through the links on the page. There are four different tags for robots – index, no-index, follow, and no-follow. The ‘index, follow’ robots tag is the default for search engines and the ‘no-index, no-follow’ tag is used to block page indexing and link juice transfer.
- Image Alt tag
Image alternative text or the alt tag is important for image optimization and indexing. When its primary use is to help the visually disabled people to understand the image; it also helps search engines to index the image logically. One must use relevant key-phrases in image alt tag to make it related and topically contextual.
Website’s Content is The Real King
If an entrepreneur has been hopping around different digital marketing blogs for acquiring knowledge, then most probably he has already heard that content is the undisputed king of the internet marketing realm.
An entrepreneur must make sure that his website’s content is of superior quality. Content is the food for search engines such as Google and Bing. If the company serves good content to them, search engines will start appreciating their efforts by ranking the website higher.
A few things to do while creating contents
- Companies should check for content originality using online tools before publishing on any websites. Failing to do so may hurt their search engine rankings a lot, and at times that may not be fully recoverable.
- Generally, long contents rank better. At the same time,
SEO writers must understand that they should not elongate their content unnecessarily if they don’t have anything good to write. Instead, they must focus on publishing content which answers all possible questions on a topic. Doing it consistently will benefit their website and ultimately the business. - Use of keywords is also very important. Making sure that the content has related keywords placed at meaningful positions is the best policy. Overusing keywords not only makes the content difficult to understand by the readers but also disappoints the search engines.
- Take special care of other media contents, like images and videos. Both these increase the dwelling time and help in generating business leads. Try not to use images or visual contents which are already published somewhere else. Publishing unique, fresh images will attract the search engine crawlers more frequently.
- Internally link webpages contextually and logically from other page-contents. Doing this increases the page-views, helps in achieving better organic ranking and ultimately boosts the sales conversion rate.
Backlinks are References for Search Engines
If the content is the king, then the king must have his queens. Backlinks are just as influential for search engine rankings as contents.
Digital marketers usually say that content is the most powerful aspect of internet marketing. While this is partially true, one shouldn’t forget the absolute power of inbound links.
These inbound links actually work like references to the website for Google. The better references a website acquires, Google will consider that more authoritative and thus improves its ranking.
Nonetheless, at the same time one must understand that if they generate a few such references from a couple of bad websites, those same references will do more harm than good for the site.
One should always try to acquire natural inbound links from relevant and authoritative websites. While a few types of backlinks are already blacklisted, site owners can concentrate on a few conventional link types which are still relevant and effective.
The primary focus should be to create great content which will attract inbound links naturally. This can be done by creating and publishing cornerstone contents on the website (or as guest authors on other websites), by posting informative infographics, podcasts, videos, etc.
Apart from the click-able links, companies should also try to acquire citations with their brands’ name from multiple high authoritative websites related to the business niche.
Local Businesses Should Bank on Local SEO
If a company is doing its business focusing mostly on its local customers, then Local
Why are local rankings important?
Most businesses already know that their local customers are searching for their business on Google. If the company cannot position its business on the Google Local Box, then it is missing many of those local sales opportunities.
How do we rank for local search queries on Google?
Google used to rank 3 businesses along with their business name, address and phone number on the Local Box. The Local Box generally appears on the top of the organic results. Therefore, ranking on the Local Box can be very much profitable for a business.
In this regard, businesses need to perform two primary things:
- First, one needs to register complete and accurate business details on Google My Business tool and verify it.
- Second, they need to build local NAP (name, address, phone number of the business) citations on local business directories. The more consistent NAP citations businesses earn from local authoritative business directories, the possibility of ranking on the Local Box increases.
What else can we do?
In addition to these two, companies should also try to receive genuine reviews from their customers and clients on Google My Business company page. Doing it not only improves their Local Box rankings but also influences other prospective customers to buy their products.
Besides this, businesses should focus on other trusted platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to showcase their customer reviews. Google counts those as reliable external local references.
Along with these, being active on Google Plus also helps in local ranking.
Build a Strong Technical Foundation
If the site owner is from a technical background, he may enjoy doing the technical optimizations by himself. Otherwise, they need to confirm that a few technical
What are the top technical SEO techniques to follow?
- Among all technical optimization aspects, canonicalization is the one of most One canonical URL must be used for each webpage pointing to the URL the site-owner wants search engines to index.
- Set the website’s domain version. It must either open with www or without it while redirecting the non-set version to the set version permanently (the 301 redirections).
- Redirect the non-existing page URLs to relevant, existing, internal page URLs permanently. Doing it on time will enhance the user experience and reduce the bounce rate and pogo-sticking. Additionally, site owners can design a few customized error pages to handle the unknown 404, 403 and similar errors gracefully.
- Optimize the website loading speed by using the GZip compression, browser caching, compressing image file sizes, reducing the HTTP calls, and using a CDN.
- Build and update website’s sitemap files. Additionally, submit and resubmit those on the Google Search Console tool.
- Each website must have a robots.txt file placed on its top-level root folder. WordPress will do it by itself. The robots file is imperative to restrict the search engine crawling, and block the website’s directories, and pages from getting crawled.
Triple checking all these will help businesses a lot to rank on top organic positions of all search engines.
3 Unconventional and New SEO Developments to Follow to Bulletproof the Growth
Embrace a Mobile-First Designing Policy
Mobile optimization is not exactly new in
Why is mobile-optimization important?
A business owner should know that more than half of his customers are searching for similar businesses using mobile devices. Unless his website is ranking for those searches, he is bound to lose many of those sales opportunities.
- First of all, if the company already has a website, check whether it is mobile responsive or not. Mobile friendly websites will mostly rank on top organic spots when searched from a mobile browser.
- If the website is not opening properly on different smartphones, consult a designer and make it mobile responsive as soon as possible. Additionally, check whether the Viewport Meta tag is used correctly on the site’s pages.
- If the website is already mobile responsive, still one should confirm that on the Google Search Console tool. Visit the ‘Mobile Usability’ section and check if the website has any mobile usability errors or not.
Count in Voice Search Optimization
Voice-Search is one of the newest developments in
When one customer is asking Google something related to a product in words, and the company website is not ranking on the search results, then it’s a pure loss for the business.
How to optimize for voice-based searches?
- Use conversational keywords, LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Keywords), keywords with ‘near me’ phrase on page contents logically.
- If it’s a product company still it should focus on creating ‘how to’ contents that are searched by its targeted customers. If the company can create a big pool of knowledge-based contents that site will have a much better chance of ranking for various relevant voice-based searches.
- Format the content logically and meaningfully to make it more human-readable. Try to answer multiple questions on the topic contextually.
- Keeping a topical ‘frequently asked questions’ section on important pages is effective for voice search optimization.
- Site owners may also create a couple of contextual lists formatted properly with HTML at the beginning of the contents for better voice-based search optimization.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are the Future
With more and more conversational keywords being searched on a variety of topics, it is becoming increasingly difficult for Google to show the relevant results to its searchers.
How are AI and Machine Learning a part of SEO ?
Nowadays, people expect Google to answer their questions even before they visit any of the webpages from the results.
Therefore, Google introduced the ‘Answer Box’, where they try to answer the questions by finding out the most relevant and comprehensive solution directly analyzing the ranking websites.
All these need Google to be smarter than it is used to be. That is why Google is gradually incorporating Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in their core systems.
Google has already introduced the RankBrain algorithm which is the first of its kinds of algorithms to use artificial intelligence for the organic ranking and indexing.
In this early stage of artificial intelligence in
- Instead of creating multiple pages targeting the similar intent keywords, build one superior page targeting all those topical keywords that will answer all questions on the topic in depth.
- Design the website and its content keeping its audience and goal in mind. The customers’ needs, preferences should be the first priority while developing the site-layout and content structure.
- Group contents topically and logically to cater those seamlessly to their audiences.
- Use Structured Data Schema in site contents. Furthermore, validate their correctness using the Google Search Console tool.
- Additionally, to increase the sales and improve the user-experience, companies may also use artificial intelligence enabled chat-bots on their websites. These AI chatbots behave like humans and help site visitors 24/7 by getting them relevant content and answers easily.
Entrepreneurs must build strong data analysis skills to predict customers’ needs. There is plenty of good tools available on the internet for different types of data analysis.
At times, one tool may not be good enough to forecast something critical. In those cases, businesses may use multiple tools together to get the correct data.
Wrapping Up
SEO gets businesses to the company. Therefore, investing resources, skills and time on
Many entrepreneurs think that
In reality, SEO takes the longest time to deliver the results.
Having patience and a focus on creating quality assets in the form of top-class contents and authoritative links for the website and blog will bring in business and also establish the company as a brand in front of its target customers.
search engine optimization concept
