Inhoudsopgave
SEO explained?
To make it clear how SEO works, we will actually have to explain how the techniques work that provide excellent SEO optimized website. Optimizing your website/page consists of several actions that together make the overall SEO value go up. These actions include:
- Keyword research
- Determining what the most important keywords are in Google
- Writing clear and relevant content
- Writing for your online target group
- Search engine marketing optimization
- Link building
- Making sure your online "business card" is in order. Your meta data!
Why should I use SEO?
Very simple! You use SEO to reach your online target audience, generate traffic to your webpage or website and from there go get the online leads through Google. To achieve this you need to be visible in search engines like Google. Over 90% of the Dutch begin their search for information about products, services or business in the search engine. Make sure you are the first to appear in Google, SEO is therefore smart to include in your seo strategy.
Google takes SEO very seriously and so can differentiate websites, with content on the website, between websites for the hobby and websites meant for other purposes and making money. It can be a long process, but can be incredibly profitable for your online business.
"It's not a sprint, it's a long-distance marathon."
Keyword research
You want to optimize a web page to get more online leads, for example, but where should you start? Exactly, a start of the right SEO strategy is often keyword research. A keyword research determines where your web page should be found. What volume does a particular keyword have? How much competition does that keyword have? Does that keyword consist of one or more words?
When you have researched this and have a clear picture of your most important keywords, you can take the next step. The next step is to create content by, for example, writing texts about keywords that you have determined.
Tuning your content for visitors
Initially, you always want to write your webpage for the reader. Therefore, make sure that the content on the page is relevant and understandable to read for the visitor. For example, if you sprinkle keywords all over your page in an attempt to optimize your website, it will be at the expense of the content and Google may even penalize you for this. Google can interpret this as keyword stuffing, which Google sees as "deliberately manipulating" the content you create. Search engines like Google see how and whether visitors value your content and they adjust the Google ranking accordingly. In the same way, Google keeps track of how long visitors spend on your website and to what extent they click through or click away. However, if your content is not properly optimized, your web page will not appear high in Google's search results either. Are you unable to increase your reach and reach the right target group in large numbers? Try other forms of marketing, think for example of influencer marketing.
Using local SEO
When users search in Google, they will unknowingly enter keywords to search. Every website's goal is for your website to be found for those keywords.
For example, when someone searches for "bicycle repair shop Tilburg", and you have a bicycle repair shop in Tilburg, you probably want to be found for that search and have your website displayed. Unfortunately this is not easy, Google has to show that your website is relevant for this search. The goal of google is to make it as easy as possible for the user (aka the one who is searching), by offering the best and most relevant information available. A digital marketing agency certainly understands this and has such specialists who have been in this business for years. If you can't do this yourself, there is no shame in it.
How do I make sure my website is valuable to others?
You can and that is of course very clever. Google evaluates your website not only on relevant information, keywords, usability and metadata. Google will also judge your website on factors such as whether people find your website important. Google can measure this by traffic, clicks and time on and to your website. Another important way is also another seo technique. Also called link building. When a website has many online links to your website, Google will see this as valuable, because why would a website link to another website? Right, a website will only do this if they think your website has relevant information and is valuable for its visitors. Not many people know about link building, but this is extremely important to include in your seo strategy.
Use clear meta data
Metadata or meta information is actually 'information about information'. In short, the meta data is the entire structure of a website, separate from the content. Think for example of using the correct formatting of the following elements:
- Page titles
- Structure of the texts
- URL’s
- Meta descriptions
- Breadcrumbs
- Intern links
- Extern links
Search engines are smart and in fact use robots (also called crawlers, bots or spiders) to scan a website, understand the subject of your website and eventually index it. Neat and optimized meta data will make those so-called robots understand your website better. With search engine marketing optimization, a website will rank higher in the search results page than the websites where this data is not optimized.