SEO is an intimidating topic, even for professionals. So we’ve put together the ultimate simple steps to guide to making your website SEO friendly, right now. Forget about the pandas, the penguins and all that talks about algorithms for a moment, and let’s focus on the SEO friendly basics that will have search engines loving you a long time.

Keywords

Keywords make your website rank in search engines and direct people to your content, so they’re the first, and perhaps most important, step to making a website SEO in a friendly way. To find the right keyword think about what people would type into a search engine and do some basic keyword research to discover what the most popular search terms are on your topic. Once you’ve found your keyword or phrase, strategically place it in the title, Meta description, permalink (URL), H2 tags (headings), in the alt text of images, as a tag and naturally throughout the copy.

Crawlable Link Structures

It allows your website to quickly and easily be found by search engines and helps them determine what the page content is about. So, must use meaningful keywords in your URL rather than numbers and symbols for the best results.

Post Rich-Quality Content

The content on your website has a great impact on whether or not it is SEO friendly because. You can ensure your content is indexable, publish high-quality, informative content that gives visitors exactly what they are looking for, which ultimately lowers your bounce rate (although there is no confirmed connection between rankings and bounce rate). Also, you make sure there is no duplicate content on your website, because that warrants an SEO penalty and can severely impact your ranking.

Images

Change the name of the file to a description of the picture e.g. Paris.jpg rather than image123.jpg as it helps images appear in search engine image searches, ultimately exposing your website to new readers and driving traffic towards it. You should also include alt tags on all images too.

Diverse Link Profile

Once you have completed all of the onsite steps to make your website SEO friendly, it’s time to work on your backlink profile and brand awareness. Start by creating a diverse backlink profile with both follow and no follow links pointing to your site. These links give your site credibility and greater visibility in search results, making it easier for visitors (and search engines) to find your content. To put it simply, links pointing to your website act as a ‘tick of approval,’ and the more ‘ticks’ you have, the more Google will love you (and then reward you).

Social Media

While it has been suggested that social media is not a direct factor of Google’s ranking algorithm, there are many, many benefits to having social media platforms linked to your website. Social media platforms start the process of sharing your content across the web, which ultimately increases pageviews, generates new leads, drives traffic, widens brand exposure and builds your community of followers – all of which indirectly supports your SEO efforts. Start with Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, and then depending on your niche, explore LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest.

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