You own a startup and you want to let more people know that you exist, or you’re a small local business owner and you have been around for a few years but people still cannot find you on Google. But why can’t they? Although it’s not usually a quick fix, the simple answer to why they can’t find you when searching on Google or Bing is that your website has a low SEO score.
Content is King
We live in a competitive world, and the Internet has made becoming well-known even more accessible and therefore more competitive. When it comes to standing out from your competition, creating quality content is the best way to become noticed. If your website has better content than your competitors than your website will attract more attention than theirs will, more followers, and eventually more sales because everyone knows about your website’s superb content.
Develop Your Website Using Good SEO practices
That’s the end goal that all content marketers desire, however, before you start creating your content you should ensure that your website is professionally crafted in a way that represents your brand, is updated frequently, and adheres to the rules that determine a websites SEO score.
Understanding SEO to Improve Your Score
An SEO score is a somewhat mysterious beast. Google keeps the algorithm that determines the score top secret, nonetheless, the marketing community has gained a clearer understanding of SEO and we now know how to improve it. There are several actions that you can take that will improve your SEO score, but they are all focused on improving the organization of your website.
Does it Have a Sitemap?
Does your website contain a sitemap? A sitemap is simply a place on the website that indicates the organizational structure of your website for web crawlers (Source). Web crawlers are the bots that gather data to index a website for a search engine (Source). If your website does not contain a sitemap, we recommend that you create one both to make navigating your website easier for the visitor and to significantly boost your low SEO score.
Does it Allow Access to Web Crawlers?
It’s important to allow web crawlers to automatically index certain pages so that they can determine the SEO score for a website. To check if they can, just add /robots.txt to your website URL, and you’ll be taken to a page that tells you what pages they can access and cannot access. Although it’s important that the web crawlers have access to some of your pages, it’s in your best interest to prevent them from accessing your website’s private or personal information, such as customer information because web crawlers will also have access to that information and can be used to steal that information.
Do You Update Content Regularly?
If you don’t then you’ll run into issues SEO. Besides, if you don’t update your content, you’re probably also missing out on marketing opportunities and being an interesting website. Most websites update their content to retain loyal visitors to the website and draw more traffic to the website.
Headers and Tags
As long as your website is organized well, your website will probably have prominent headers, however, without deliberately putting a header using your website editor – WordPress for example – then your SEO will be lower than it would be with a header. When you’re writing a blog on WordPress, you should also tag words relevant to the content you’re writing about to boost your SEO score. This simply allows search engines to find relevant content related to the keywords that are used to search.
Bottom Line
If you want people to be able to find your website when searching for it, you’ll need to fix a few aspects of your website such as creating a sitemap, updating content regularly, and inputting tags and headers using your website editor to name a few. Organization is critical for a website, but at the same time, people and the search engines that people use want to know that there is new content. All these components and more are used to create your SEO score, which if high, puts you at the top or near the top of the first page when searching on Google or Bing.
