Important Aspects of SEO – Introduction
In a previous article, we talked about a few bad SEO practices that may affect your SEO strategy negatively. But what about the positive aspects of it? Or more precisely, what about the most important aspects of SEO you should consider. In this article, we are going to list five important factors that may affect your SEO strategy entirely.
SEO is the mathematics of running, advertising, and increasing the overall presence of your website over the internet. It is like a giant clockwork machine that works in harmony to keep your SEO strategies functional.
Search Engine Optimisation allows you to improve the overall visibility across the internet and generate organic traffic to your website. The aim is to generate organic traffic by appearing on search result pages in South Africa. A proper SEO strategy will generate a high amount of organic traffic to your website. See how important it is to optimise SEO?
Of course, you have to have a good strategy and patience to yield results. Knowing the important aspects of SEO would help you understand the areas you should focus on. In this article, we will sum up all the aspects that may define your SEO strategy.
Keyword Research
Keyword Research is the heart of your SEO strategy. This involves knowing the high performing keywords your audience in South Africa is searching for. A subtle shift in your keyword choice may improve or break your SEO.
There are various keyword research tools available to determine your strategy. These tools provide detailed insight into the keywords you choose. Ranging from generating ideal keywords for your topics to knowing how highly it performs across various search engines, these tools can do it all. As there are various free and paid keywords tools in the market. You have to experiment to find out which tool is best for you. You may have to find multiple tools to gather all the required data for your strategy. This article by ahrefs has listed the top 10 free and useful keyword research tools.
Finding optimal keywords for the topics you choose requires patience and experimentation. So, do your research well, don’t be afraid to experiment around, and use high performing keywords to improve your visibility.
If you require assistance or more information, our doors are always open for your enquiries. Connect with us to know more!
Content Planning
Content planning is where your SEO strategy truly shines. It is important to be clear with your objectives and goals before you start working on your content. It should be relevant to the topics you choose. But more importantly, it should be woven well around the keywords you choose. Content planning is where your keyword choices will matter!
Having original, well-sorted, readable, quality content on your website that revolves around your keyword will do wonders for your SEO strategy. Your content should be easy to explore. Furthermore, it should add some quality to your website’s visitors. This includes providing quality information regarding services you offer, products you are selling, or generic information through blogs, and so on. Remember, your content plays an important role in converting the visitors into your customers.
Once your content is on the website, you should perform a periodic audit to understand whether your strategy is yielding results. Make sure all your content abides by Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Failing to comply with them may result in Google taking actions on your website.
Digital Lime Green has dedicated itself to helping our clients in content planning. Feel free to reach out to us in case you need some personalised assistance.
Functionality and Technical Optimisation
Everything that happens in the back-end of your website is generally associated with the functionality and technicality of your website. Functionality and Technical Optimisation refers to optimising loading times, responsive website designs, metadata, sitemaps, links, and so on.
Your website should be optimised to load fairly well. Not only does it improve the user experience but helps your SEO as well. Most research studies agree that the higher the website loading time, the higher chance of driving the visitors away from your website. This article on Think with Google provides a good summary of the effect of website loading times on bounce rates. It mainly focuses on mobile website optimisation but the information is applicable to all.
Following the aforementioned point, let’s talk about responsive website design. This refers to optimising your website across all the platforms so that it is easily accessible. This is important as there are more smartphone users than desktop/PC users in South Africa. If you are interested in statistics, FlickerLeap has sourced and compiled a variety of statistics into their article (2019).
A sitemap is one of the most important aspects of SEO strategy. It allows GoogleBot crawlers to navigate through your website easily and index webpages. A sitemap tells the crawlers which pages to index and which are unimportant. Optimise your robots.txt to define which pages are allowed to be indexed.
Optimise your metadata and site linking for a better SEO score. A broken link reduces the overall functionality of your website, but it also harms the user experience. Make sure your links are well-maintained, metadata is well-written, and your CSS and HTML code is well-optimised for your content.
Feel free to reach out to us in case you need personalised assistance regarding the topic.
Indexing and Crawling
Crawling refers to allowing a GoogleBot to navigate through your website for indexing purposes. Indexing simply refers to the process of adding your website pages to google’s search results. As mentioned in the previous point, a well-structured sitemap will help Google crawlers to navigate through your website with ease and help to index the important pages you want to show. Unless a page is following the no-index meta tag, all the WordPress pages will be indexed by default. (Source: Google)
The rule of thumb here is that you should only allow indexing of the important pages. Important pages here would mean the actual content you want to display and build your SEO strategies with. This will allow your website to rank higher in search engine results. Indexing also decides your overall ranking based on many factors, such as backlinks, internal linking, content originality, and many more. We recommend this guide by Shout Me Loud for a complete and simplified understanding of crawling and indexing and how it plays an important role in your SEO strategy.
Contact us for a better understanding of the strategic use of sitemaps and indexing.
Analytics and Reporting
You need to understand how your SEO strategy is doing. Without a measurement tool, you will never understand how effective your strategy is, right? Analytics and reporting help you exactly in that. Analytics refers to generating statistical data regarding how your strategy is doing. Reporting refers to utilising such data for study and comparison with your goals and objectives to understand whether your strategy is doing well.
There are various free and paid tools that will help you with this. These tools have the same goal, yet they may function differently. Based on your needs, you may want to explore your options. Increase your overall SERP ranking and traffic by generating proper insights.
Digital Lime Green can help you in the process as well. Reach out to us for quality and insightful analytical data that may help you identify the strengths and flaws in your strategy.
In Conclusion
The aim of this article was to sum up the important aspects of SEO that affect your SEO strategy drastically. Consider these aspects when you plan your SEO strategy and aim to maximise the efficiency, which will eventually generate more and more organic traffic on your website. It is important to be patient, no matter what strategy you follow. Do not go for any shortcuts that may result in negative consequences. Lastly, always remember to follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines to avoid negative consequences for your website.
We also have written an article on how you may be able to improve your overall search engine visibility with the cocktail of SEO and Google Ads. Take a look here for further read: Google Ads vs SEO | Know what’s the best practice for your website
If you need further help, Digital Lime Green is well-equipped to help you form and/or guide you through your SEO strategy. Take a look at our SEO Services and understand how we can help you! Connect with us to know more about it today.