SEO: To Keywords – and Beyond!

How to start building your SEO strategy? How to attract visitors?

In our previous blog, we discussed the importance of content and specifically, keywords, and indeed, keywords are still important, but a good SEO strategy is so much more than that. With the evolution of search engines, the algorithms are getting more and more sophisticated and users are getting more demanding, so we can’t solely focus on keywords. We need to think about the ‘why’ behind a user’s search. Rather than just scanning for keywords, search engines thoroughly look at your website to determine the overall scope and relevancy. In short – no keyword stuffing please. We need to think about the user’s intent, the readability of our website, and what answers the user is looking for. We could get technical but let’s try to keep it simple for now. 

Back to the Basics

When starting to think about the design of your website, SEO is an important factor and there are two basic goals to keep in mind: to rank well by search engines and also to help and engage your visitors. SEO can be quite complicated and sometimes rather technical and confusing because there are so many different aspects to consider. But let’s start with some basics. It’s important to ensure that your website is structured in a way that makes it easy for both search engines and visitors to scan through the content and understand what it’s about. The minimum you should do to help your SEO is:

  • Have a unique and descriptive title for your page (we will dive a bit deeper into that later).
  • Make sure that the title isn’t too long so it won’t get cut off in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
  • Don’t forget your keywords! Make sure you include them but in a natural manner.
  • Include useful and relevant meta tags to make it easier for the search engine crawlers to understand your website.

The Importance of Meta Tags and Structure

It may sound basic, but structuring your data is extremely important for your SEO. This is how search engines know what content to feature on their SERPs. Properly structuring your data can make your website more visible and increase your click-through rate. Now, what do we mean by structured data? It’s organizing your content in a way that helps search engines find and understand your content and website and allows them to provide accurate results to their searchers. This includes the use of headings. Headings make your content more user-friendly for visitors and they’re important for SEO because they quickly allow search engines to better understand and evaluate the content on the pages.

Let’s move on to meta tags. What are meta tags you ask? They are part of the HTML of your website that describes your pages’ content to both search engines and visitors. Think of them as the first impression for all search engines. Google reads or crawls content from top to bottom, so let’s start at the top with the meta title tag. It’s a small piece of code at the very top of a webpage and it appears in the back end. However, most people know it as the title that appears on the SERPs. It can differ from the website’s actual name. It’s an important part of the SEO since it can affect the click-through rate, and a good click-through rate means that Google is more likely to rank your content higher. Here is what searchers see and why it’s important to choose the right one.

What Are Meta Descriptions and What Do They Do?

Next is the meta descriptions. This is also an HTML element but this one summarizes your web page. It’s a way for searchers to preview what they can expect from your page and can be seen underneath the meta title tag. Now, the meta descriptions don’t serve as an official ranking factor for search engines but they’re nonetheless important as they also influence whether or not a user chooses to click on your page. To include meta tags and descriptions in your website and the SEO strategy you don’t need to know any coding. Nowadays we have CMSs, like WordPress, and SEO plugins that allow you to easily optimize your website.

In conclusion, these are just a few factors that can help you with your overall SEO strategy and aren’t difficult to implement. It’s important to remember that properly structuring your content, including useful headings with relevant keywords and meta tags, makes it easier for search engine crawlers to understand your website and its purpose, thereby making it easier for people to find it and at the same time find their answers.

We hope you learned some new things today! If you have questions or you need support: you can always ask duomedia in the comment section or on our contact page.