With the help of Search Engine Optimisation, one can increase the quantity and quality of traffic to their sites through organic search engine results. Max Portanier, SEO Consultant gives us a beginner’s guide to SEO success

Let’s skip the basics and look into what’s working in 2021:

Rich snippets:

With every google search, Google gives uses the title searched for in blue, the URL on the top in Black and a short description of what the page is about. This is referred to as a snippet. Featured snippets are selected search results aiming to answer the users question with just one click. The richer the snippet is the more additional valuable information it displays. Rich snippets are visually more appealing. These types of snippets can only appear for pages with certain type of information. Pages with recipes for example rank higher with richer snippets as people tend to click when they encounter more enticing search results. The example shown on the right displays a rich snippet. Before even clicking on the website this rich snippet is giving you the method, rating, cooking time as well as calories consumed.?

Schema markup:

As audiences expect more up to date information to be delivered quickly, such as events they plan to attend, an event schema markup helps in optimising event web pages to show up on search result pages. With the help of schema markup websites can run more informative results. Schema markup helps search engines better understand your data. Event schema is mainly used while sporting events are taking place. This is a type of data markup that provides search bots with all the important details on a webpage. These specific facts and changes are immediately apparent on SERPs as rich results. With these rich results your webpage can occupy more screen space pushing competitors competing for that screen space further down the line.

Content:

The longer the text is, the more clues Google gets to find out what the article is about. Google tends to think of shorter content as thin content and this content probably does not have enough information the user is asking for, making it rank lower. Utilising keywords and phrases and sprinkling these keywords throughout the text is one of the most common SEO strategy. The use of keywords throughout the paragraphs should appear natural. Apart from the text, keywords should also appear in the URL, meta data, and page descriptions.

Backlinks:

Backlinks are links redirecting readers to other websites with more in-depth detail of what the highlighted key phrase is referring to. Major search engines tend to see backlinks as “votes” for that particular page.?Backlinks are extremely important as they tell search engines that the content on that particular website is valid. Earning backlinks from trustworthy sites is considered a great asset when dealing with content.?The higher the number of backlinks a page has, the higher the rankings tend to be in organic search.

Similar Content:

Duplicate content is text which appears the same on more than one website. If the same content is seen in more than one website, google sees this text as ‘copied’ and tends to rank the website which is more ‘trustworthy’ in organic search. This presents an issue to the site as in this case search engines are forced to bring up the site where the content is more valuable.

WATCH:

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SEO can increase your visibility online by saving time and cost of marketing.? SiGMA News will go into all of this and more in the coming SEO series.?

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