Knowing how to SEO a website is essential to ensuring its top performance and garnering a web presence that can be the cornerstone of a successful online marketing strategy. There are several key elements that search engines like Google and Bing take into consideration when determining where pages are ranked in search results. The consequences of where a site appears in the list are immense and have direct and significant impacts on potential earnings.

Simply put, a business cannot afford to have a site that is not SEO optimized. Here are some of the key principles in determining how to SEO a website.

It All Starts with the Content

Valuable Content. The most important part of your site is its content. Even before SEO tactics are applied, a site that provide useful, well-written and engaging material will be rewarded in page rankings simply because readers will want to return to it and recommend it to friends. The chief aim of the Google ranking algorithm is to find sites that will be the most valuable to users. Adopting the same mission in your content will help your site garner more attention.

Optimizing with Keywords. Including in your content the same keywords potential clients use when searching for similar products or services is a cornerstone to attracting visitors. The targeted words should appear both in the titles and body of the material in an organic and natural way. Note: it is important not to “over optimize,” as Google will get suspicious if it sees the keywords too many times. This may lead to a penalty in the rankings.

Update Regularly. Another aspect that often gets overlooked is adding new, original content regularly. A website that often updates itself and provides new material will rank better than those that remain stagnant. Google expects a site to continue to grow, and contributing to it frequently is a key indicator that it is accomplishing the means to do so.

Avoid Duplicate Content. Material that appears somewhere else on the web, verbatim or close to it, receives a penalty in the search rankings. Google views duplicate content as less valuable, since it is not unique. Often, a website may contain content that is repeated on various pages, hindering its ranking. In some instances, another site may steal material and post it, resulting in an indexing punishment without the original owner of the content being aware of it.

Fine-tuning the Meta Data

Meta data is additional information communicated to search engines that doesn’t actually appear on the site itself. This includes titles tags, meta descriptions, and alternative text associated with photos.

While many hosting platforms make it easy to add meta data to a page, following the specifications that make it more attractive to search engines is a little more complicated. Meta data components often have to fall within specific character counts, as well as include keywords to draw in more visitors.

Collecting Quality Backlinks

Another chief component of how to SEO a website is getting other reputable sites to link to you. Each time another source posts your link on their site, it’s a small piece of validation that can help you climb up the ranks of search engines. Business partners, directories, trade associations and other members of the industry are useful places to start looking for linking opportunities.

[crp]