Techblog
Top SEO tricks to appear on Google
By the myBusiness techblog team
According to SearchCIO-Midmarket, search engine optimisation (SEO) is the practice of editing aspects of a Website to improve its ranking in search engines. While SEO is good for businesses of all types and sizes, there is little doubt that growing enterprises benefit the most. With SEO, growing businesses can gain higher visibility if ranked higher in search engine results. And this boosts their presence among critical stakeholders - i.e. online customers, business partners and investors.
Picturing the SEO process
SEO uses a variety of techniques to ensure websites are found by search engines. But generally, it can be boiled down to three phases of activity. These are crawling (discovery of websites via a spider or bot), indexation (filtering of websites), and ranking (using algorithms). Here is a scenario of how the SEO process goes. For Google, the Googlebot tool crawls the web to capture data. Based on the data generated during the crawl, it sorts and analyses URLs to make indexation decisions. Based on the indexation decisions, it ranks websites. This process goes on in a continuum, over and over again, in real-time - while you Google for something.
Top SEO Tips
SEO can target all kinds of content from images, videos to plain text. Here are tips to help you rank higher on the results page of search engines like Google.
Tip 1 - Make your site tag-able
Create title tags and description meta tags that are unique for each page on your site. This lets Google differentiate your site from other competitors. When people search for your page, the words that match your user's search will in bold, so keep those key words in mind as you build your site.
Tip 2 - Improve site infrastructure
By creating simple-to-understand URLs, you make it easier for Googlebot to crawl and index your site's content. In addition, you can tap on Webmaster tools to create a XML Sitemap file. This file makes it easier for Google to discover and index the pages on your site.
Tip 3 - Optimise site content
Using Google AdWords and the Keyword Tool, you can discover new keyword variations, and their associated search volumes. It will help to choose words that are relevant to your site, with the aim to drive more traffic over to it. Google Webmaster Tools also provides you with top search queries your site appears for, and identify the ones that might lead more users to your site.
Tip 4 - Handling crawlers on-site
A crawler is a program that browses the web to provide up-to-date data to display on search engines. The "robots.txt" file tells search engines whether they can "crawl" onto different parts of your site. Due to the large volume of web pages, and the fast frequency of changes made to the pages, many search engine crawlers have a hard time extracting the data from sites. Making your site more Google crawler-friendly would raise its visibility on the results page. Visit this link to learn more about search engine crawlers.
Tip 5 - Make your site mobile-friendly
With mobile devices that can surf the web becoming commonplace, it is essential to tap on mobile device user searches as well. Since mobile sites are configured differently from normal desktop sites, you may want to make sure that your mobile site is indexed by Google via Googlebot-Mobile. To do this, create a Mobile Sitemap and submit to it to Google via Google Webmaster Tools. This informs Google of its existence. For more information, check out the Mobile Webmaster Guidelines.
Tip 6 - Promote your site
Go big, and increase your presence online. Google will be able to match interested groups of people to your content if it is mentioned about and is trending online. You can boost your online presence by tapping onto social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
On a final note, remember to base your optimisation decisions, first and foremost, on what's best for your target audience rather than on Google as a search engine. Google search engine is simply a means to an end, and you should stay true to what your site can offer, rather than creating a site specifically tailored to search results.