BLOG 29 SEO TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES Technique 1: Meta descriptions: this piece of text is what a customer first sees under the website title on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It’s a concise sentence, touching upon the search topic, it needs to spark interest with persuasion to visit the website, so users click through from the SERPs to the website. Technique 2: Backlinks: a form of referencing within articles or text on a website – often underlined or highlighted and called ‘anchor text’ – a backlink is any hyperlink on that website that refers the audience back to your website. Backlinks are one of many metrics used by Google to measure the value of a page and can also be known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, or inward links. The hyperlinks themselves direct people to a website, improve web traffic stats, and the quality and quantity of backlinks contributes to improving the website ranking on a SERP meaning better visibility and increase in web traffic. Technique 3: Word count optimisation: although it’s not thought that word counts on websites contribute to SERPs rankings, the content on a website is read by software called bots or crawlers to pre-determine the quality of a website and its ranking. This software can read html code and written text, but not images and videos, and you need to be able to convey to an audience what you do in an informative and engaging way; for both of these reasons, you do need a substantial amount of text on a website to be able to do this. This is where the figure of 500 words per page helps depending on the business and the website’s intent. Ultimately, the word count is important for the bots and crawlers to have something to analyse and use, and also to keep the audience engaged and leave them wanting to return again. Technique 4: Publication frequency: website traffic isn’t just about new people landing on your website, but also repeat visitors and recommendations to other users. This is where quality engaging content comes in and finding the right schedule of when and how often to upload new content is key. Depending on the industry, the quantity of publishing new content varies; for new sales leads, an average of four days communication is a generally acceptable amount of time between email shots, while a company posting twice-a-day seven-days-a-week on social media will expect to see high engagement. Anything outside of quality-content on the website, should be seen as an opportunity to market the business and build brand awareness by directing people to the website. A key element of website publishing are competition and offer pages with separate landing pages, these see high volumes of web traffic and don’t have a negative impact when high in frequency. Technique 5: Responsiveness to mobile phone: a visitor to a website will become a repeat user if the website is easily accessible and easy to navigate. Ensuring websites are adapted for use on multiple devices is key to holding audience engagement. Typography, its sizing, spacing, sentence length and alignment, needs to be slightly larger than a desktop and easily readable in a natural flow to the user considering mobile proportions and scale. Mobile designs for website provide the option of interaction from users to be able to respond, be it with text, images, and video display, allowing users to make a call, click on a link or buy a product. By making it easy for users to navigate websites with ease, and perform the actions they desire, means they will likely return, contributing to continued web traffic stats - they are also more likely to recommend the site to others for an organic increase of web traffic via word of mouth.
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