The website has been one of the most important showpieces of every company for a long time. This is where customers go for detailed information about our services, and often their first impression is based on the quality and appearance of the website. Therefore, every owner should make sure that his organization’s website appears as high as possible in the search results after entering a phrase that is associated with its activity. This is what we mean when we talk about search engine optimization. What does website positioning depend on? You will learn more about it in this article.
It rarely happens that when looking for the results we are interested in, we look at the second or third page of the search. No wonder, when we are looking for answers to bothersome questions on the Internet, we primarily care about quick access to information.
Research shows that almost 70% of all clicks are collected by the first five pages displayed after entering a given phrase in the search engine. Only less than 6% of clicks are made on pages 2 and 3 of the search results. And this is probably the best answer to the question of why we should take care of our website’s high position in the ranking.
Organic Search Engine Optimization vs. paid
Search engine optimization is the process of building traffic to your website from organic search results. Well, “organic” – that is what?
Search results can be divided into two categories – paid and organic. The first ones are nothing more than ads bought by website owners, always appearing as the first few results at the top of the list. So it might seem that a small budget is enough, and the topic of website positioning is overwhelmed. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Remember that advertised content will not be displayed to internet users with AdBlock enabled. In addition, people do not trust links signed as “ADVERTISING” and often subconsciously jump straight to organic results, i.e. those that are not financially supported. According to research, only 6% of all visits to websites come from paid search ads, while 64% of visits are due to organic results.
Issues taken into account by the algorithms
How does the search engine rank websites and what to do to get to the top?
Searching for information on the Internet, users enter specific phrases into the search engine, called “keywords”, based on which Google’s advanced algorithms create a list of websites devoted to this issue. These algorithms take into account many factors related to the content and structure of pages. Interestingly, Google changes its algorithms from time to time. Thus, it is necessary to constantly adapt websites to the latest guidelines, maintaining competition and causing constant changes in rankings.
However, some factors remain invariably important for Google’s algorithms and that determine how high a given page will appear in search results.
Keywords
One of the most important SEO issues is the proper selection and use of keywords. Good keywords are those that are closely related to the topic presented on our website and are often searched by users. However, they cannot be too general, because the more popular a phrase is, the more pages are positioned on it, and thus the harder it is to get to the top of the search list. For example, imagine the website of an online grocery store.
Keywords such as “online store” or “online shopping” have tens of thousands of searches per month, but after entering these phrases, we see pages of large, popular chain stores, rich in content, whose budget for SEO is incomparable to just develop businesses. In such a situation, it is better to bet on other, less popular keywords. Selected phrases are placed in as many places on the website as possible – in the headings, addresses of subpages, and in the content of texts that appear, for example, on a blog. Thanks to this, the website has a chance to be displayed in the search results after entering a given term. There are many websites and tools to help you choose keywords, but it is worth relying on the help of specialists who have experience and knowledge in this topic.
Linking the site (external and internal)
Another very important issue influencing SEO is linking. Internal linking is nothing more than preparing the appropriate website structure and navigation, which will be intuitive and as little complicated as possible. Our goal should be to create a path that will lead the user to the information he is looking for in the fastest and most obvious way possible. Each page on our site should be accessible from all other places on the page with just a few clicks.
Internal linking has an impact on website positioning, but it is particularly important from the perspective of creating a positive user experience. However, external linking is much more important in terms of SEO.
External links are links that lead users from another site to our site. Currently, Google algorithms pay attention not so much to the number of such links as to their quality. In order to avoid the creation of pages used only to link other websites, i.e. “Link farm”, organic traffic and indicators such as Domain Rating, which determine the quality and credibility of the linked page, are taken into account. The higher these ratios, the more the link is worth for our SEO.
Content search engine optimization
What you should be prepared for when working on SEO is constant changes, updates and the need to publish new, interesting materials on the website. As part of content optimization, it is worth creating a blog where we will systematically publish articles about our business. What to take care of when creating texts for the website? The most important elements are:
- filling the content with keywords;
- readability, e.g. through appropriate text formatting;
- supplementing entries with properly signed photos or video materials;
- internal links leading to other places on the site;
- clear and unambiguous meta title – a fragment of a hyperlink that defines the title of a given subpage.
We hope that the above article has made it clear to you what SEO and website positioning are and what factors affect them. Remember that the items listed above are just a few of the many taken into account by the algorithms. In order for your website to be in the desired TOP 5 search results, it takes a lot of time and works to optimize your website, which is best done for you by specialists. The competition is fierce, so don’t wait and get a strong position as soon as possible.