Lowering search engine results is a real challenge for those who want to make themselves known online and increase their competitiveness. As we have seen, SEO is a key element for the success of an online business. Putting techniques and strategies into practice to improve the positioning of a site in search engine results is useful for increasing one’s online visibility, receiving visits from interested users, and increasing one’s online credibility.
The process of positioning a website essentially consists of 3 phases:
The analysis phase is of fundamental importance to understand the growth potential of our website, identify areas for improvement from an SEO perspective and identify the main keywords to work on the website to beat the competition. Useful tools for site analysis:
Google Analytics is a website monitoring service made available by Google. It is a real dashboard showing site access statistics using clear, easy-to-consult charts and tables. From an SEO perspective, Google Analytics allows us to retrieve information regarding organic traffic from Google. The first step to start using this tool is to create a Google Analytics account and insert the code obtained on your website to verify its ownership and monitor site access.
Google Search Console is a tool made available by Google to analyze and check the status of your website in search results. With Google Search Console, for example, it is possible to find out which search keywords the site has been indexed on Google and the average position of each keyword. Also, in this case, to take advantage of the SEO tools made available to the service, it is necessary to register and validate the ownership of the website.
The analysis work is preparatory to optimizing the website to improve the site’s positioning in the organic results of search engines. Through the analysis, we have identified the pages that generate more organic traffic and the main keywords; now, we have to start optimizing our pages by “working” the identified keywords.
The correct compilation of meta tags is of fundamental importance to obtain good positioning and show the page’s main contents to end users. Meta tags are portions of text that describe the website’s contents and make it easier for search engines to read. The best way to optimize meta tags is to place the main keywords in the images’ page title, description, and alt attribute.
As Bill Gates said, ” Content is king”: creating interesting content is the core of SEO activities. Once the keywords have been identified, it is necessary to review the contents of the pages to insert the main keywords in a completely natural way, creating relevant, useful, and interesting texts for web surfers.
For proper website optimization, creating a sitemap that helps search engines understand the site’s structure and content organization is a good habit. The sitemap is, in fact, a web page that lists the hierarchy of the pages that make up the site to facilitate its scanning by search engines.
The last phase is that of the control to verify the results obtained in terms of positioning of the site on search engines. The verification must take place after some time from the optimization phase to give search engines the time necessary to “process” the interventions implemented.
After evaluating the period to carry out the monitoring, the results obtained are analyzed by checking the average position of the keywords treated with respect to the initial situation and the increase in organic traffic in the pages we have modified. Having analyzed the results, we can define a new optimization process to consolidate and improve our positioning.
Many factors influence search engine results, and it can be challenging to keep up with the changes that Google makes to its algorithms and translate them into actions that both engines and end users like.