What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing a website so that it ranks high in organic search results on the search engines.

On all search engines there are 2 different types of search results. Paid Ads (on Google these are displayed at the top and bottom of the search results list with a small Ad icon next to each result), and Organic Traffic, which is all other search results displayed (on Google 10 organic search results are displayed on page 1).

The goal of any business website is to achieve high organic rankings for specific and relevant keywords and search phrases, so that they appear on page 1 in the search results when people search for these keywords or search phrases.

You may think that SEO is something that you "implement" on your website, because that was mostly the case back in the late 90s. Many people pay a lot of money to SEO "experts" and expect that their website will be Google page 1 after the SEO has been "implemented" by the "expert". I'm afraid it's not quite this simple these days. With the ever-changing Google algorithms, it's often difficult for SEO experts to keep up with what works and what no longer works in terms of SEO today.

It's important to understand that there are multiple factors taken into account by the search engines when ranking websites.

Inspired by the man who coined the term Search Engine Optimization back in 1995, and our many years of experience helping clients with SEO for their websites, we've put together our Top 10 SEO Tips for getting found more easily on the search engines, increasing website traffic and ultimately increasing your sales.

In our experience, we have found that analyzing patterns and competitor data by using our proprietary keyword research tool, SearchTriggers, is one of the key strategies that will help you to increase your search engine ranking.

So let's dive in with these Top 10 SEO Tips!

1. Direct Website Visits

Search engines love websites that get over 10,000 direct visits per month. A direct visit is a click to your website that is not from another website or social media post. Some examples of Direct Visits are typing the website address directly into the search bar and clicking on it from there or clicking on a link in an email. Backlinks from other websites and social media posts are not considered 'direct website visits'. Backlinks are still important in terms of search engine ranking, but not 'the' most important factor.

Here are our recommendations for increasing your Direct Website Visits:

• Run paid Ads on Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram and other sites and filter them through a Tiny URL service such as my.earthgrid.com or SearchTriggers Clicks menu. These redirects conceal the source of the traffic and therefore they appear to the search engines as direct clicks.
• Email your list with engaging content and value and include CTA (Call To Action) buttons pages on your website.
• Buy traffic and email them with offers and links back to your website.

2. Time on Site

The time that a visitor spends on your website during one session is an important factor for search engine ranking.

Here are our recommendations for keeping visitors on your website for longer and increasing your Time on Site:

• Embed video content on your website so people watch the video and stay on your site while watching the video.
• Create more content on each page, with text and graphics, that help keep the user engaged.
• Use Mouseflow to view your visitors navigation on your site, and learn when they are navigating away from your site. Using this information, you can adjust your website content in order to keep them on your site for longer.

3. Pages Per Session

The number of pages each visitor views while they are on your website is important when ranking your website on the search engines. This means you will want to create lots of pages with valuable content across your site.

Here are our recommendations for increasing your Pages Per Session.

• Create a blog or write articles and have a sidebar that includes links to the posts or articles, as well as a search feature, for the user to easily navigate around your site, and find what they are looking for.
• Add links at the bottom of your pages and articles, or in a sidebar, to other related articles or pages on your site, to encourage them to click to another page.
• Hyperlink text on your posts and articles to other pages on your website, to encourage them to access more pages.

4. Bounce Rate

Search engines love websites that have a low bounce rate of 45% or lower. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that navigate away from your website after viewing only one page. So the key factor here is to keep people on your website and prevent them from clicking the back button to go back to Google or wherever they came from.

Here are our recommendations for reducing your Bounce Rate:

• Provide lots of valuable and engaging content on your site, such as articles and videos.
• Include CTA (Call To Action) buttons and links so they are encouraged to click to other pages.
• Include free offers with buttons so people are more likely to navigate through pages.
• Keep people engaged through encouraging comments on article pages.
• Increase your engagement rate = 100% minus Bounce Rate.

5. Number of Backlinks

A backlink is a hyperlink from another website that goes back to your website. Search engines love backlinks because it demonstrates your credibility if other people are talking about your business. Whilst the number of backlinks is important, the quality of the backlinks is also important, so you'll want to get backlinks from websites with high domain authority.

Here are our recommendations for increasing your Number of Backlinks:

• Share backlinks with colleagues or other related businesses, where you post a link to their site and they post a link back to your site. Win-Win.
• Write and publish a Press Release about something exciting and newsworthy happening in your business. This will get posted on many news websites.
• Be a guest blogger or writer for websites in your industry, and include a link back to your website, either within the post or in your bio.
• Write articles on LinkedIn, with a link back to your website.

6. The 60/20/20 Rule

The 60/20/20 rule is all about website metadata. Metadata are the Title, Description and Keywords tags that are specified in the code on each page of your website, although they are hidden from the page content. The Title and Description appear in Google search results.

The recommended priority of each metadata is:

• 60% - Title - create a keyword rich and highly relevant page Title for each page on your website
• 20% - Description - the description is still important, particularly because it is displayed in Google search results, but only one third as important as the Title metadata.
• 20% - Other Content - all other content on your websites, including Keywords metadata, anchor text, and content on the page.

Our recommendation for creating keyword rich and relevant metadata is to use our proprietary tool SearchTriggers. This tool finds high demand, low competition keyword search phrases, i.e. keywords or search terms that are being used regularly in search engines, but there are not many competitor pages on the web with those keywords.

7. Long Content

Search engines love websites that are giving value and writing long content. The recommended number of words per page is 2,000 for optimization.

Here are our recommendations for writing Long Content:

• Write long articles. Writing articles is a great way for you to share your knowledge, experience, opinions and personal story, and inspire more people online. We believe that blogging is out, and writing valuable articles that are not time-based, are in. Give your clients real information and helpful tips that they can immediately use and apply to their life or business.
• Use accordion or tab elements on your website that include a lot of text in each element inside the accordion or tab. In this way, the search engines will see all the long content, but the user experience will be simple and manageable.
• Search engines also love fresh content, so make it a priority to write articles and add more content to your website on a regular basis.

8. Keywords in Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text that is hyperlinked from another website to your site. Search engines will rank you higher when the anchor text is optimized with relevant and rich keywords for your business. So when other websites link back to your site, using backlinks as described above, ensure the anchor text contains relevant keywords.

We recommend using our proprietary tool SearchTriggers, to find keywords related to your business to include in the anchor text.

9. Mobile Optimized

In the growing age of mobile technology and living life 'on-the-go', being fully mobile optimized is an absolute must, both for your users, and for the search engines. There has been a lot of hype over the years about mobile compatibility. However, it's important to ensure your website is "mobile optimized", not only mobile compatible.

Mobile Compatible means that a website is 'viewable' on mobile. Most, if not all, websites built today are viewable on mobile in some form. Mobile Optimized means that a website has been specifically built for mobile efficiency, with images and media optimized for quick loading, content succinct for maximum effectiveness and user experience, and mobile-only functionality such as tap-to-call, tap-to-email and map functionality.

To ensure your website is fully mobile optimized, it's important to build your website with this in mind, or use a website builder that already provides these mobile optimized features.

10. Video Content

As well as providing valuable and engaging content to your readers, adding videos to your website also is valued highly by the search engines. As mentioned above, adding videos may also help to increase Time on Site as users may watch the videos.

Videos can be hosted on a variety of platforms, such as YouTube or Vimeo, and then embedded on your website.

Article Written By Sally Mitchell, founder of OneCircle Marketing.

We hope this has been a helpful guide to get you started with SEO for your website and online brand.

Please follow us on social media and contact us with any questions.