Do you remember playing the game “Where’s Waldo” as a child? Waldo is a cartoon character who appears hidden in drawings among a large number of other characters. It takes a lot of attention and a good eye to spot Waldo in each scene.
What is the connection between a cartoon game and the SEO for your website? Well, your website IS Waldo in today’s online landscape. It is one of the millions of other websites. Even for small and specific industry niches, your website is still one of the thousands of websites that offer similar products and services to the same group of customers.
The problem is that the customers are not looking for your website specifically. They will click on the first Google result they get and do business with that company, and If they are not happy with it, there are 9 more options on the first page of Google search results. They are highly unlikely to go beyond that. A common joke among SEO specialists is that the best place to hide a dead body is on page 2 of Google search results.
Evergreen SEO Practices Involve:
Proper maintenance of your website
Searching for the right keywords
Continually updating your website with fresh, original content
Making your website easy to find by Google spiders (they are not real spiders, but pieces of code which crawl websites collecting keywords);
Making your website content easy to share on social media.
These being said let us take a look at the most recent best practices for boosting SEO for your website:
1. Use Long-Tail Keywords
No, you do not have to adopt a pet and let it help you manage the website. Long-tail keywords contain various qualifier words which make them more specific. For example, “leather shoes” is a general keyword. “Handmade women’s leather shoes in Melbourne” is a long-tail keyword.
Long-tail keywords help you compete with larger companies and also help you find customers in your local area. After all, if you sell handmade women’s leather shoes in Melbourne, you are not looking for customers in the Americas or Asia.
2. Create Inbound Links
Inbound links are links that appear in a piece of content on your website and lead to another page on your website. For example, if you speak of the way you make the handmade shoes in the blog section of your website, an inbound link will take the web visitor to your catalogue page where they can select a shoe model.
3. Add Quality Outbound Links
Outbound links are links inside your site that point to other websites. For example, the handmade shoes’ website can have outbound links to consumer protection websites, to the Better Business Bureau page showing the business rank, etc.
The more trustworthy the outbound link is the higher your own page rank, so make sure that you add only quality and reliable outbound links to your website.
4. Try to Rank for Featured Snippets
Featured snippets appear in a box in the right-side column of Google. Most people would choose the site with the featured snippet over other results because they get a short explanation of what the site is about and – simply- because this snippet box stands out visually.
There is no magic formula to get your website featured, but Google uses some of these criteria:
Keywords used on-page and their semantic relevance to the search keywords;
Simple page structure that supports the extraction of snippet text;
Clear and short subheadings throughout the text.
5. Fix Broken Links
In some instances, you edit the URL of a web page to include a new keyword. Once you have done this, you must search for all the references pointing to the old URL and update them. This free tool helps you identify broken links on your website.
Last, but not least, remember to update your website frequently with new content: articles, photos, videos, products, etc.