SEO Web Design and Development

» IMPROVING A WEBSITE’S RANKING IN SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS

SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the practice of formatting a website and its contents so that the site appears in more search results and higher up on those search results. Improving visibility in this way brings more visitors to a website, improving brand awareness, user engagement, and revenue generated by the site.

SEO is not just a way to improve visibility; because search engines prioritise sites that perform well and have meaningful content. It also helps create an all-round better experience for visitors.

Netgen develops websites using WordPress, which is a platform that allows us to structure, manage and publish content in an SEO-friendly way. There are also plugins, themes and reports available that have been made specifically for SEO.

How to improve SEO ranking

Publish quality content – The quality of the content on a website has the biggest influence on its SEO ranking. Good-quality content – content that is informative, well-written and readable – improves traffic to your website and makes it more likely that other websites will provide links to yours.

Key words and phrases – Keywords and phrases are words and terms that people might use in their search for your website. These should be used in URLs, headings, meta descriptions and within content.

Update content regularly – Regular updates are an indication of a site’s relevancy, which affects a site’s ranking.

Metadata – Crawlers read a site’s metadata, so you should include your keywords and phrases in yours. Title metadata is very important, as it’s used for page titles at the top of the browser window and as the headline within search engine results. Description metadata is sometimes also shown in the results.

Backlinks – Links to your website from other websites, particularly popular, authoritative sites, improves the credibility and ranking of your own site.

Alt tags – You should describe all of your images and videos using alt tags, or alternative text descriptions. These allow text-based search engines to find the objects and include the pages in their results.

How do search engines find and organise information?

Search engines use crawlers, which are programs or scripts that automatically visit publicly accessible web pages and follow links as if they were human visitors browsing the web.

While being crawled, websites are rendered as they would be in a browser, and performance and content are both taken into account.

The data collected by crawlers – the contents as well as usability data like page load speed – is stored in the search engine’s index, which is essentially a huge database of websites.

Search engines usually employ different types of crawlers, each dedicated to a specific type of page or file, such as general content, videos, images, news, ads, etc.

Developers can assist crawlers by including a sitemap with the website or using specific tags within a website’s metadata.

When you search using a search engine, you are searching through this index rather than the internet itself.

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