Building a Strong Foundation: Holistic SEO
Developing your search engine optimization (SEO) approach isn’t just about keywords. Holistic SEO involves considering all aspects and components of your website and online presence to optimize for search engines. By doing this, you can build a strong foundation for your website’s SEO, so that if one aspect is struggling, the others are still holding your site up. When all are going strong, then your website has a good chance of rocketing up the rankings or holding a strong position.
Holistic SEO generally involves keeping the important elements in mind. They are on-page elements, having an effective content strategy, and off-page optimization. These three elements working in concert will give your website more authority, generate backlinks, and a stronger base to build from. Here are some strategies that will help you fulfill those elements and get your site to the top of the rankings.
On-Page Technical Elements
There are several ways that you can optimize technical aspects of your website so that it is as search-engine friendly as possible. For instance, you can structure your website well. This means that it has clear navigation steps for search engines to crawl and index efficiently and effectively. Your contents and pages should be organized into logical categories and have appropriate internal links to make the user experience as flawless as possible.
Make sure you include meta tags in your pages as well. These are quick descriptions for every page that will provide relevant information to search engines and improve your click through rates. Heading tags are also important. This means categorizing your content by using the tags in your word processing so that search engines can understand the hierarchy of your content and what’s more important.
Finally, an often overlooked technical aspect is page speed. Your website must load fast, or else users are going to click away before they get a chance to see it. Optimize your images, minimize code, and use caching techniques to improve your page speed and keep users from clicking away.
Off-Page Optimization
Yes, you can optimize your website with elements that are technically not a part of it. It involves focusing on elements that are outside your website but can influence your online reputation and authority. The goal is to produce quality backlinks. These are links from other websites to yours. Preferably these are authoritative websites, and not just your personal blog, for example. In many cases, you should hire an SEO link building agency as they have the tools and techniques to get websites linking back to you.
Search engines consider backlinks as votes of confidence from other reputable websites. The more you have from high-quality websites, the more authoritative and high-quality your website appears. This will help you rank higher. These backlinks from reputable websites can drive valuable traffic to your site, increasing your visibility and gaining you potential conversions.
There are several strategies for link-building, however you must be ethical. Guest blogging is a common strategy where you write on another website’s blog and they allow you to insert links in your content. You have to get accepted by that website, however, so your content must be high-quality. You can also use influencers to place links in their content, and you can pay to promote content as well. Social media shares of your content will also give you backlink opportunities. The key is that your content must be engaging and informative enough for people to want to share it.
Content Strategy
The foundation to every SEO strategy is building high-quality, relevant, and engaging content. Without it, your SEO efforts will continue to be stalled. This means creating original and informative content that is valuable for the user. Valuable user content will provide them with relevant answers to questions, and will meet their specific needs at the moment. This is not just valuable for the user, but also helps increase your engagement if they share it.
Of course, along with creating quality content, you have to do your research and incorporate keywords into your content naturally. Users and search-engines will then know if your content is relevant to what is being searched. If your keywords are not naturally incorporated, the search engines will recognize it, and users will too, meaning they will click away faster. You should also not try to stuff keywords in as much as you can, as this will be a mark against you with search engines.
The key is providing a seamless and enjoyable user experience. This means easy readability, being mobile friendly, and fast loading times. These will all help with your search engine rankings.
Holistic SEO
The best thing about holistic SEO is that each one of these elements can build on the other to create a strong base for your SEO efforts. While on-page technical elements ensure that search engines can crawl, index, and understand your website effectively, they can also make it easier to read and navigate for the user, for example. SEO takes patience to see it pay off. By building your website over time by considering all these elements, you will find that your page is consistently on the first page of search engine rankings and staying there.