We have arrived at the last step, and perhaps the trickiest step, to becoming successful online. You have a website, it is filled with content, you use the right tools and use social media as a marketing tool. Now you need to make sure you can actually be found. For this, you need SEO This may sound far from your mind, and it is certainly tricky, but we will help you take the right steps. It is important for entrepreneurs to get the right knowledge and guidance, we at Monkey Vision try to assist every business in the world of search engine optimisation.
Search terms
The goal of search engine optimisation, also known as SEO, is to rank as high as possible in Google. After people enter a search term that matches your website, you want your link to appear at the top. You will therefore first have to research which search terms your target audience uses. A handy tool for this is Google Trends. Before you delve deeply into search terms, it is wise to distinguish between 3 categories. The 'find' terms, the 'informative' terms and the 'do' terms.
Find terms
We start with the 'find' terms. When people are looking for your website or company and are already familiar with the name in question, they will use it as a search term. As in the example below.
Informative terms
The 'informative' terms are used when people are looking for information on a particular subject, but have no idea which website can provide that information. For example, when looking for the best restaurant in Amsterdam. These terms often start with 'Who', 'What', 'Where' or 'How'.
Do terms
The last, and most probably the most important category, are the 'do' terms. These are, for instance, the people who are looking for the task your company performs, but do not yet know of its existence. So it is important to focus on these terms and make sure you rank high here.
In the last example, you can see that Monkey Vision s website is displayed as the fifth search result. The top four links are paid ads in Google. This is also known as SEA. SEA stands for (Search Engine Advertising). The big difference with SEO is that for SEA, you pay for your website to be shown in the search results, and for SEO, you have to work from within so that the website can be found 'organically' well. So you can clearly see here that Monkey Vision 's website is the best to be found organically. We will explore this topic further in next week's blog.
Link building
Link building is seen as one of the most important criteria that make a website rank higher in the organic Google results. Google values the number of links to your website and the more other websites use your website as a source, the more important Google will find your website. This increases your domain authority. And the higher this figure, the higher your position in Google. It is therefore a good idea to ensure that many other websites use you as a source.
Quality over quantity
When link building, it is incredibly important to keep the well-known phrase 'quality over quantity' in mind. After all, many links from low authority websites can cause more harm than benefit. For example, avoid dozens of links per month on home pages. Look for websites that are of good quality to link to your website.
If you provide good content and vary links, you will be fine. For variation, consider a combination of shares on social media, source links from other websites, link building on start pages and a good internal link structure.
Load time
To rank higher in search engine results, you need to look critically at your website's load time. Google recommends a page load time of under two seconds.
Many websites fall far short of this. Therefore, it is important to try to do so, because it means you will rank higher in search results.The loading time of your website depends on the following factors:
- Technique: how is the website built?
- Hosting: the server on which the website runs
- Client speed: the visitor's internet speed
Google PageSpeed Insights is Google's tool where you can see how many points Google gives to the speed of your website on desktop and mobile. Read how to test the speed of your website in our Tip of the Week - Website Speed.
Google My Business
With Google My Business, you can inform Google directly about your business. In turn, Google can use this information in its search results. Instead of having Google search for your information, with Google My Business you tell it directly. Google has made it incredibly easy for entrepreneurs, so any entrepreneur will be able to sign up. To improve the findability of your organisation, it is recommended to create a Google+ profile and also claim your location in Google Maps. Check out our blog on further optimising Google+. With Google My Business, you manage your company's data for Google search, Google Maps and Google+ in one dashboard. Think of address, phone number, opening hours but also business-related images and social media updates. This is nice, because from now on you no longer need to update this data on all the different Google platforms.
Tools
Yoast SEO
To set all the SEO search terms and do the on-page SEO properly, you need the Yoast SEO plugin. Yoast will indicate for each page what still needs to be improved in terms of optimisation. Read and learn even more about the Yoast Plugin at Yoast' s own website.
The plugin will indicate what still needs to be done and what is wrong. Besides optimising pages, the Yoast Plugin will also give away some tips. For example, setting permalinks, linking with Google Analytics etc. Of course, the best source to learn even more about the Yoast Plugin is Yoast' s website itself.
WP Rocket
The best plugin to optimise the speed of your website is WP Rocket. With WP Rocket, you can easily set up caching for WordPress websites and webshops. With these benefits, we can speed up websites and webshops by up to 50%:
- Page caching: With page caching, visited websites are stored in the user's browser. The stored data and information saves some of the loading time during the second visit to the website.
- Cache preloading: WP Rocket improves the findability of your website by encouraging people to visit the websites they view.
- Image Lazy Load: using images quickly affects the loading speed of a website negatively. To prevent this, WP Rocket loads images only when they should actually appear on screen, for example while scrolling on a website.
- Reduce files: Smaller files make for faster loading times. With WP Rocket, all web files, including HTML, CSS and Javascript, are compressed and thus significantly smaller.
Kraken.io
During an SEO analysis of a website, one of the areas of improvement that usually emerges is that images can be further compressed (made smaller). Standard compression programmes often do not achieve the highest compression, and still fall through in Google Pagespeed Insights. Kraken.io can do this.
A link to Kraken.io enables extreme compression of images without any visible loss of quality. Images are made up to 65% smaller within minutes. This will make a huge difference to the loading time of your website. Kraken.io is easy to implement in WordPress.
SEO is something you can learn and apply to your own website. However, without experience this takes quite some time to do this optimally. We at Monkeyvision have a lot of experience with this and therefore now offer the SEO Starter Pack. Contact us for more information.
This was we last blog of the Successful Online series. So are you starting a business and want to become successful online? Then take this series of blogs with you and you'll get off to a flying start!
Successful Online - Website,Successful Online - Content,Successful Online - Tools, Successful online - Social media
