The importance of SEO for a business these days cannot be underestimated. Every business needs to do it in order to succeed or in some cases just to stay relevant in today’s market.
Sometimes the difference between a good SEO campaign and a great one can be just a few small details. Now, what’s meant by this is that you should look to add a few more strings to your SEO bow to ensure its maximum effectiveness. What else can you do apart from traditional SEO to give your business a little nudge over your competition?
Use Fresh Content or Update Popular Old Articles
If your website is static with no kind of updates or if it just keeps posting rehashed versions of one type of content again and again, it becomes stale and search engines start viewing them as a dead entity which has nothing new to offer to a visitor.
If this happens, you might as well kiss all your hard earned rankings goodbye because search engines especially Google wants to keep websites with fresh or regularly updated content at the top of its SERPs.
On the other hand a regularly updated site provides search engines with a source of new information that provides value to a user which they would then be eager to promote. Here is why you should regularly update the content in your website:
More Indexing
If you have updated an old article that was once very successful in generating visitors to your website with new information, your page will be crawled again by Googlebot and indexed because of it. Thus, updating an old article not only ensures that your content is still relevant but it gives you a chance of getting a boost in rankings.
Google Loves Updated Content
You should optimise your pages for all the major search engines out there, but there is no denying the fact that Google is the biggest prize of them all, especially in the UK.
Googlebot crawls a site looking for new content or updated old content. If the updated version of an old article provides value and is reliable, you have a higher chance of getting a ranking boost with each update.
Use Alt Tags
The alt attribute is used to provide an accurate description of an image used in a page. Generally an alt tag is used to provide a textual description of the image to users who are unable to view the image in a browser or have disabled image display.
More importantly there can be SEO benefits of using an alt tag. Think of a search engine algorithm as being visually impaired, it cannot see the images you have uploaded on a page. Even if there is text embedded in the image, search engines cannot see it as they can’t crawl the text embedded in that image.
Thus, by not providing a textual description of the image with the help of an alt tag, you miss a golden chance to improve your website’s online visibility.
The information you provide in the alt tag will be used by a search engine to determine the best image to return when a relevant search query is entered. Ranking high on an image SERP can be a great way to bring new visitors to your site which will help you further in boosting your rankings. This might just give you the edge you need over your competition.
Social Media
Social media like SEO is an organic strategy that focuses on establishing an appealing identity for a business, so that it can naturally attract more visitors.
If you have a strong social media presence and a number of followers, it helps establish your business as an ‘authority’ which can greatly enhance your search rankings. Here’s how social media can give your SEO campaign a much needed boost:
Increases the Number of External Inbound Links
Link building is one of the cornerstones of a good SEO strategy. If you receive external inbound links from sites with established reputation of expertise and trust, it will give your site more authority in the eyes of a search engine and your rankings will improve accordingly. The greater quality of inbound links your website receives the higher it ranks on SERPs.
To attract high quality external links you will firstly need unique, authoritative and useful content. Social media can then act as a broadcast channel for your content. Using keyword relevant hashtags can also give your website a greater online visibility. This is will assist in establishing your reputation as an authority in your niche which maximises the chances of earning quality external links to your pages.
Increases Your Number of Followers
The number of social media followers your business has does have a significant impact on how it is ranked on a SERP. For example, a business with mere 200 followers won’t enjoy the kind of ranking bonus Google will give to a business with say 200,000 followers.
Increasing your number of followers is not easy, but if done organically and over a period of time it can give your website significant SEO benefits. This process can also improve customer engagement which can help in not only building a sizeable following but also maintaining it.
