Did you know that over 60% of organic website traffic comes from organic search? To succeed in building a strategy based on content, it is therefore essential to master your referencing on search engines.
This tutorial shows you 10 best practices for getting started in SEO by presenting optimization areas to boost your visibility on search engines and thus increase the number of visitors to your site.
What is natural referencing or SEO?
Search engine optimization, more generally called SEO (Search Engine Optimization), brings together all the techniques and best practices that aim to improve the positioning of a page, a site or a web application in search engine results (Google, Bing, etc.).
Search engines like Google index web pages much like a website page directory.
Once you create a website, search engine bots crawl your website to understand the information on it and index it accordingly, so that it appears in search results according to the query you enter. Search engine robots crawl websites and can make sense of information based on elements such as text, structure and non-textual content. These elements help bots index your website and rank it in their library based on different factors, such as relevance and authority.
This is where search engine optimization comes in!
SEO refers to the process of making your site better for search engines. It involves optimizing websites so that search engines understand the value and relevance of your pages by ranking them in search results.
There is one VERY IMPORTANT thing to understand about SEO!
The pages of your website are indexed individually on search engines and not as a whole. This means that your SEO work must be done page by page with the expertise of an expert in the field.
Why is SEO crucial?
The previous section already gives us an idea of the importance of SEO. To better understand, think about your own search habits.
Let’s say you go to Google because you want to find information on a specific topic, for example, “how to create your website”. You just type it like that or maybe you just type “create your website”. Immediately you get a list of results.
Which one do you click?
Have you ever gone beyond the second or third page of results?
Probably not and if so, not that often.
This example shows why SEO is important. Having your pages optimized for search engines helps your overall search ranking.
Your goal is to be on the first page (even better: in the first ads) of the research that your customers carry out in order to increase traffic to your site.
The Geekworkers Web agency succeeded in propelling the site in less than 6 months Recycling-Market.ch in the first positions on Google thanks to SEO. The site therefore appears in the first five positions on keywords such as “Swiss online flea market”, “second hand furniture” or “Swiss second-hand sales site” and many other words related to the second-hand market.
Which guarantees an increase in traffic, sales and therefore the company's turnover every day!
How to start the SEO optimization of your website?
Here are 10 SEO tips for beginners that you can use to improve your website right now.
1. Do Keyword Research and Use Relevant Terms
Keywords play a major role in SEO. A keyword indicates the main subject of your article and is what allows people to find your article on the web by making a query on the subject that interests them.
A keyword is a word or set of words that people type when searching for something.
This is why you need to make sure your keyword matches the search intent of your target audience. It may be a short keyword like “Lausanne web agency” or a keyword long tail like “which web agency to choose in Lausanne?”.
- Shorter keywords generally have higher search volume. This means they may be more difficult to classify.
- Long-tail keywords have lower search volume, but they are very specific in comparison.
The advantage being that you can target the exact audience that is interested in it. It is best to opt for a mix of both long and short keywords.
Also, it is ideal to consider the search volume and ranking difficulty of the keyword intended to be used.
- Search volume indicates how often people search for that specific keyword. Higher search volume means people are more interested in that topic.
- Ranking difficulty, on the other hand, indicates how difficult it will be to rank in search engine results.
Keywords are essential, but they are not the only element in optimizing a website. You need to focus on other important aspects to increase your traffic.
2. Place keywords on your page
Each page or blog post contains different relevant keywords. For this article, the keyword is “SEO optimization”. It’s a keyword that can bring Internet users to this page!
Ideally, your chosen keywords should be in:
- The URL
- The title of the page (or article)
- The first and last paragraph of your page content
- Repeat several times in the text of your page with synonyms
- The tags (description and alternative text) of the images used
As long as they don't disrupt the main thread of the article, don't hesitate to add them! Beware of over-optimizing your pages to avoid being penalized by Google. This is what we call the Keyword stuffing which we will discuss later in this article.
3. Include SEO in permalinks
A permalink is the URL you see when you navigate to a web page. The logic of writing your URLs tells a lot of information about the overall structure of your website, they should not be too long and, at the same time, clearly describe what the web page is about. For the reader and also for the robots that crawl your website.
As previously mentioned, indexing robots or (Web crawler) crawls all the pages of your site to analyze their content and index them. Use clear and explicit words in your URLs. For example, if you sell second-hand items online, structure your pages with permalinks to show people what they're accessing and to help contextualize the overall information. This makes the hierarchy clear to search engines and helps with your site's SEO.
- https://recyclage-market.ch/
is your website - https://recyclage-market.ch/categorie-produit/meubles/
is a page where people can find furniture - https://recyclage-market.ch/boutique/
is the page where they will find a product; office chairs
As the name suggests, a permalink is permanent, so it's important to determine which ones are appropriate for your pages. It is not recommended to use specific dates or information that may change.
Indeed, having a page online for some time contributes to better SEO. You should therefore not delete the URLs that contribute to the visibility of your pages on search engines.
Being able to maintain your pages with up-to-date information is essential and that means creating a timeless URL structure.
It is therefore not recommended to mention specific dates or years in your URLs and titles insofar as your content is intended to serve the long term.
4. Create hyperlinks between your existing pages
If the site text you write references other elements of your site, create a link! It is recommended to create a hyperlink between the content of the pages of your website. This contributes to a better user experience by helping the reader discover more related content and navigate to other pages on your site, as well as helping bots index and contextualize your web pages.
5. Write quality content for your readers. Stop keyword stuffing!
Of course, you need to write content that engages readers. Be sure to cover your entire topic and not leave out any information that might be important. It's essential that you give your audience insight into the desired topic and answers tailored to their needs.
More words don't necessarily mean better quality, but since it indicates that the topic has been covered in depth, it can help.
Aside from covering your topic in its entirety, writing in a clear, yet elegant and conversational manner works wonders. Don't put your keyword everywhere in your article in the hopes of having a high keyword density. Trying to cheat the system by placing as many keywords as possible everywhere will not work and many will be penalized for it.
Search engines are very smart and can recognize keyword stuffing.
There are very powerful tools such as Semrush to analyze and determine if your page contains relevant keywords and if it complies with SEO quality standards.
6. Optimize your images
From the point of view of understanding your pages, images play a very important role. They help visualize your content better and make it more understandable for readers. But they are also important for SEO because they help your website get crawled (indexed by search engines). An image cannot be explored, but what can be explored and indexed in particular le ALT text and image description which are essential in SEO strategy of your site.
Have you ever noticed the images that appear at the top of your search results? They are also a great way to direct people to your website and therefore indicate that your website and images are relevant to the search topic. The compression of your images also plays a determining factor in the SEO of your website. Site speed that can alter user experience has become a determining factor for search engines. The size and format of the images can play an important role in this regard. So be sure to optimize your images properly. You can easily do this using free image compression tools such as Squoosh, cesium or TinyPng
7. Optimize the loading speed of your pages
Your page loading speed is extremely important for website ranking. The Essential Web Signals are used in particular by Google to judge the user experience.
A website that loads quickly guarantees an optimal user experience. If your page takes too long to load, it will have serious consequences due to the lack of time people are willing to wait, which will lead to a higher bounce rate (% of visitors having browsed only one page of the site). Although bounce rate is not a factor that directly influences your ranking, it is directly related to your page speed.
To overcome this problem, there are free tools to diagnose your existing websites. These include PageSpeed (from Google) and of GTMetrix.
8. Optimize your technical SEO
We talked about creating a good website structure in section 3, which can already be considered part of technical SEO.
But technical SEO goes beyond permalinks and choosing the right keywords. It’s all about creating a responsive design for your website.
This topic is very specific and technical, so it goes beyond what a beginner's SEO guide would describe.
Work with a technical expert in natural referencing, as well as with your team, constitutes the best compromise to optimize the structure and user experience of your websites.
9. Make your pages “Responsive” and “Mobile First”
As people increasingly use their mobile phones to access the Internet, it is necessary to optimize the display of your website for mobile devices. Otherwise, you will end up having a high bounce rate, because let's be honest, no one wants to stay on a website that is not friendly to our smartphones.
A non-responsive (not mobile-friendly) page design may have distracting flaws such as buttons not working or having to scroll from right to left to view page content.
A positive user experience encourages people to browse your website and take action (purchases, contact request, etc.). the “Responsive Web Design” or “Responsive Website” has become so important that Google has announced that it will soon begin mobile indexing of websites even before desktop pages.
10. Regularly update your pages and content
It is imperative to regularly update your site to reach the top positions on Google. Especially since information and trends change quickly and you don't want to be penalized in search results due to outdated information. Review older pages and sites, evaluate the content and check if it is properly optimized. If your content no longer makes sense or isn't optimized as it should, it will likely hurt your search rankings.
Don't forget to promote your content
SEO is ongoing work, but with time and experience you will go from novice to SEO expert. Posting relevant articles on your blog regularly is one of the best ways to improve your search engine rankings. For it, we can write you quality articles such as the one you have just read to improve your SEO.
Once you have written quality and relevant content for your readers, promote your content through different channels to reach an even larger audience.
You can do this organically by sharing them on your social networks or via a newsletter. Or with paid referencing (advertising), in English Search Engine Advertising (SEA). Both are important to your marketing strategy and should be done at the right time.
An organic approach (SEO) allows you to create a sustainable flow of communication with your customers. Paid advertising (SEA) helps show your content to the right audience and increases traffic to your website faster, which benefits your SEO performance.
With Geekworkers, you can optimize your website, improve your SEO and start an SEA Marketing strategy via Facebook, Instagram and Google. Our web agency, expert in SEO, graphics and website, will support you in all the digital aspects of your business.
SEO is essential for driving traffic to your website and allowing new users to discover your business, products and services. Boost your SEO with this SEO guide accessible to all!
Our SEO and Social Media packs adapted to all budgets
Deploy a natural and local SEO strategy in Switzerland as well as increased visibility on social networks thanks to our flat-rate packs adapted to all budgets.
