Are you struggling with how to drive traffic to your online shop? Have you considered searching for the products or services you offer? After typing in relevant keywords on Google, do you find yourself checking to see which page your website appears on?
Most of us tend to limit our keyword searches on Google to the first page of results displayed, and Hubspot's analysis show that 75% of people who use Google's search engine rarely view content beyond the first page. This statistical insight emphasises a key point: if your website is not appearing on the first few pages of Google's search results, your ability to attract organic traffic to your website is severely compromised.
Are you curious about strategies for outranking competitors, boosting your Google search rankings, and increasing your website's visibility? Firstly, let's introduce the concept of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
It is a technique that has emerged specifically to improve a website's ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). By implementing effective search engine optimisation techniques, you can significantly improve your website's ranking in search results, thereby increasing its visibility to potential visitors and customers. This in turn increases the likelihood of attracting organic traffic and achieving your online goals.
As an example, when you enter "best sport shoes" in the search bar, Google will generate the following Search Engine Results Page (SERP):
The green outline shows paid ads, the red outline shows the organic result, and the objective of SEO is to enhance the ranking of the organic results shown within the red outline.
After introducing the concepts of SEO, let's move on to a step-by-step tutorial guide that will help you understand and implement valuable strategies to improve your SEO rankings.
Google introduces the fundamentals of seo in the search central about how google search works. within this comprehensive framework, three basic concepts emerge, each of which plays a key role:
Crawling：
Once the new website is completed, google will start crawling your web page. The crawling consists of URL discovery, which is the process by which Google finds new or updated web pages. At this point Googlebot,which is a crawling machine designed by Google, is responsible for exploring the web page. After discovery, the page is analysed in depth through the provided sitemap.
Indexing:
After crawling, Google works to understand the content of the website, a process known as indexing. This involves storing information about your website in Google's vast indexing database so that visitors can search for your pages.
Serving search results:
After completing the previous stages, Google will serve up search results. When a user enters search terms, Google responds by providing the most relevant results, reflecting a seamless process.
With the ultimate goal of accessibility being to ensure the relevance of search results, how can you ensure that your website gains exposure and prompts Google to present your pages to searchers? The process begins with two essential elements of website building: content and images.
Meta Tags:
Within the realm of meta tags lie the Meta Title and Meta Description. These succinctly introduce your web page, guiding web browsers in presenting it effectively to visitors.
Image/Video Alt Tags:
Their significance extends beyond visual portrayal. Primarily, these tags offer insight to visually impaired readers, rendering the image's essence. Furthermore, they facilitate improved image crawling by search engines.
Internal Links:
These hyperlinks, interwoven with pertinent content across your website, serve as strategic connectors. They ingeniously link different web pages, providing search engines with a holistic view of your website's structure.
Backlinks:
A backlink is when another website references your website by including a link to it, enabling direct access. Google views backlinks as a vote of confidence in your website, which affects organic search rankings. Pages with a large number of backlinks usually rank higher.
Header Tags:
A hierarchical framework that segregates headings and assigns a priority sequence. This aids search engines in comprehending the crux of each page's focus.
H1: Conveys the overarching concept, representing the page's core idea or post title.
H2: Functions as a subtitle, categorising primary concepts within paragraphs.
H3: Expands on subsections, elucidating points and proposing further steps subsequent to H2.
H4: Classifies bullet points, delineating subcategories beneath H3.
Once the content and images are in place, it's crucial to adjust the content displayed on your website based on user searches. By targeting relevant keywords, you can cater for user intent and provide valuable information that will increase engagement and conversions.
Ask Questions:
Before setting up your keywords, you can ask yourself questions like: which customer segment do you want to target? What specific product features are customers searching for? When are they searching? Where is the potential customer's location and demographic information?
Select Keywords:
Use tools like Semrush, Ahrefs and Moz to explore your pre-collected keywords. Measure the volume and competitive power of the keywords. This insight helps optimise keyword selection.
Search Queries:
Understand the search query and use descriptive words for keywords. For example, a search for "SHOPLINE" will suggest "SHOPLINE Login" suggestions below the search bar. This approach simplifies the process of finding answers for users.
Once the setup is complete, the most important and exciting step is to track your SEO results to see which parts need improvement and which parts can continue to run. Here, SHOPLINE provides the best advanced SEO strategies to help you with keyword analysis, structural data and search engine page scanning, allowing you to quickly identify problem areas and improve them precisely.
Identifying and solving search engine optimization problems can be a time-consuming and complex process. However, there's no need to worry, SHOPLINE's free EasyRank SEO comes with a crawler tool that can help you.
EasyRank SEO mimics the behaviour of GoogleBot, analyses your shop and points out areas for improvement, including meta titles, descriptions, keywords, broken links and image ALT tags. You can use it for daily testing. In addition, EasyRank SEO offers fast and effective fixes to help you solve problems quickly and accurately once they occur.
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