Google, like any successful business, never sits still. As I write this, projects are in the works which will help the world’s favourite search engine give its users what they want in more reliable and efficient ways. This means that it’s more important than ever for entrepreneurs to be clued up on good SEO practices. If everything you hear about this subject is making your head hurt, here are three of the most important things all entrepreneurs should know about SEO…
Content is Still King
Over the past few years, the content marketing niche has exploded, and become one of the most popular methods for businesses looking to get their site seen by a larger proportion of their target market. Google’s most recent updates have had a strong focus on penalising poor-quality content, and this isn’t a trend that’s likely to turn back on itself. You need to make sure your marketing efforts are focussed on publishing quality content, both on and off your site. Whether it’s text-based, visual or auditory, Google wants to make sure it’s giving users the kind of valuable content they want. If you want to get ranked, start upping the standards of content!
Load Times Matter
One of the many factors that Google’s crawlers will take into account when judging the quality of a website is how quickly it loads. If you want to rank above your competitors, it’s essential that you do everything you can in terms of website design to make sure it loads quickly. A lot of business owners are moving away from Flash, which can certainly help. However, there’s still a lot of sites out there with poorly scripted Java and Ajax coding which will slow the whole thing down. Although the correlation between load times and SEO ranking is relatively small, it’s still there, and is expected to become a bigger and bigger factor as time goes on. If you can guarantee a fast response time, it will improve your user experience, which in turn will stimulate shares on social networks, and lower bounce rates. This is all tied up in the bigger picture of SEO, so don’t let your website sit there if it’s too sluggish.
Keywords Are Less Important Than Before
While keyword optimization was an essential pillar of SEO at one time, there are certain dangers in relying too heavily on it these days. When you’re trying to make content or a landing page rank for specific keywords, it can be easy to focus way too much on those words and phrases, stuff your page with them, and wind up with keywords popping up in far too many places on your website as a whole. This isn’t as helpful to ranking as it once was. In fact, little mistakes in keyword optimisation can in fact hurt your rank, rather than help it. These days, less is more when it comes to keywords. Try to include a wider spread of different words and phrases in each piece of content, instead of just one or two.