If every company is using content marketing as a powerful tool to increase their reach and sales then there is tough competition in the market. In this situation, your company needs to go for content optimization so that it gets more traffic and successfully reaches the target audience more easily. Before we learn how to do content optimization for your website, first we will know what is content optimization and why is it important.

What is Content Optimization?

Content Optimization is a process of curating the materials for your website in such a way that they would be easily visible to your target customers and potential audience. When they search for a specific topic or keyword in Google, your content should be able to stay at the top of search engine result pages (SERPs). Some of the most avid rules that are included in content optimization are most importantly using proper keywords, meta tags, headings, subheadings, internal links, visual content, etc. Always remember, content optimization is a way of enhancing your existing content so that more traffic is generated on your website and new potential customers get to know about your product.

For example, nowadays content optimization is mostly reflected in blog posts as every company follows its own blog as a technique of content marketing. In this case, your SEO expert is aware of what are the keywords that are currently trending related to your product and is also aware of the content produced by your competitors, so the content for your articles and blogs are written accordingly. Your article no matter how beautifully composed should be relevant to your service. If you are providing travel service, your website is expected to have blogs about traveling, budget trips, domestic and international flights, solo tripping, etc, and not about a different domain altogether.

Need and Importance of Optimizing the Content

The prime goal of content optimization is to let your target audience discover your website easily. You may write good content for your website but unless and until it is planned strategically especially what topics are you focusing on, what will be the keywords and phrases, and who you are writing for, your blogs are incomplete. This is where an SEO expert steps in and optimizes your content.

After you create and optimize your content half of the work is still incomplete. There is no use in publishing quality content if you cannot track the audience visiting your page or if it is reaching new target customers as you expected. For this regular site, checkups are very important to see if there are any roadblocks in your website or the loading speed is slow for the landing pages and many more. If there are any existing problems, the SEO expert should find a way to resolve them and it is all part of the content marketing strategy.

When optimizing content for your website, relevance is the most important factor because you want your content to reach your target audience. The SEO expert should look both at the content relevance for potential customers as well as optimize accordingly to the ranking algorithm so that the content is both visible and relevant.

Frequency is also a very important factor when it comes down to content optimization. For example, you are publishing content once every three or four months, chances are the audience will not be back since the time span is too long. At the same time, if you are wishing to publish blogs every day, your articles should not fall down in the quality factor. So, you have to pick up a frequency rate that is best suited for your audience so that they will stay tuned and visit your page regularly for reading new blog posts.

Content Optimization Tips and Strategies

If you are new to the field of content marketing or SEO, here are a few golden rules or tips that you must always remember for optimizing content.

1. Write quality content: The first and most important step is writing very high-quality content for your website. Your article should be fully authentic or else you will be charged with plagiarism.
2. Use headings and subheadings: While writing an article doesn’t just write a single long paragraph. Make subheadings that should be bold and font size a little bigger to catch the attention of the audience.
3. Optimizing the content: There are few key elements like title tags, meta description, meta keywords, and URLs that need to be added as the search engine always looks for these factors.
4. Avoid big paragraphs: When you are writing big paragraphs, the readers get distracted or lost due to the monotony of the writing. So, make small paragraphs and try to make the article look like more of a conversation so that your audience gets a personal touch and can emotionally connect to your content.
5. Insert images: Visual arts are very impactful. So, instead of writing everything down add images in between with proper image tags. This will also bring your article in search if they are searching for images with specific tags.
6. Don’t make it too technical: In order to optimize your content, don’t write too many technical terms related to your product so that your audience doesn’t understand half of it. Overuse of keywords will have a negative impact on your articles and you will lose the audience.

These are some of the mandatory strategies that one should keep in mind while optimizing content for a website. Share it with your friends so that they don’t struggle with SEO strategies anymore. Also, if you want to optimize your website you can contact the expert team of Xornor Technologies.

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But what is On-Page SEO?

On-page, SEO is a practice of optimizing every page of the website, in terms of the content of the website as well as their HTML code, in order to get high ranking in the Google searches. Since the SEO algorithms keep on changing, you need to keep up with the changing technologies and strategies of the SEO as well.

Here is the latest on-page SEO checklist for a website which you need to follow to get good results in terms of the ranking of your website:

1) Meta Tags

Meta tags are snippets or small describing elements which tells the Bot what the web page is all about. For the SEO of a page, you must include and define all the meta tags in the HTML code of the web page. These tags are not visible to the end user of the website, but to the search engine. So these are really important for the ranking of a website. The meta tags used in SEO are:

• Title tag: This is the same title tag, which appears on the browser tab, and is written in the head tag of the HTML code. The same title also appears on the SERPs. It has to be keyword-friendly, and every page should have a unique title. By default, the character length for a title is 50-60 characters (600 pixels).

• Meta Description tag: A Meta Description is the summary of your content on the web page, having a character length between 140 to 160 (920 pixels). You must write SEO-friendly and unique content for the description, having the important keywords in it.

• Meta Keywords Attribute: This attribute includes every keyword which is relevant to your content on the webpage.

• Alt tag: Alt or alternative tag is used with the images, and it is really important that you use this tag in every image on your site. The bot cannot read the images, but it can read the Alt tag. So the Alt tag helps the bot to understand the content of the image.

From the SEO point of view, the mentioned tags are the most important ones and must be included in every page of a website. There are other meta tags, including Robot Meta tag, Canonical tag, Social Media Meta Tags (Open Graph and Twitter Cards), Responsive Design Meta Tag, which are used only when required.

2) Heading Tags

The Heading Tags are used in HTML for defining different sizes of the headings on a webpage, starting from H1 (the biggest) to H6 (the smallest). While using the Heading tags, you must write content-relevant headings including the appropriate keywords, as these help the search engines to analyse what your content is all about.

3) SEO-friendly URLs

A keyword-friendly URL of a webpage helps the bots as well as the humans to understand the theme of the landing webpage and improves the site’s search visibility. The maximum URL length is 512 pixels.

4) The Content

“Content is the king”, this has been repeated millions of times, but it goes only to unique and relevant content. For better SEO of your website, you must update the content in the form of blogs or articles, regularly. Never forget to add important keywords to it and maintain the proper keyword density. Since you will be updating the content regularly, the bot will get to know about it and will crawl your website faster.

5) Optimize Your Images

Optimizing the images of a website is the most important step to be taken during the process of SEO. Image optimization includes adding a caption to the image, resizing it without compromising its quality, and most importantly, using the alt tag along with it. Like the other content, the image must also be unique and relevant to the context of the web page.

6) Speed

The speed of a website is the major factor in increasing the bounce rate. Since people have got access to the faster internet, nobody wants to wait for a website to load for too long. The average load time for a website or a webpage must be optimized to 3-4 seconds, and not more than that.

7) Mobile-Friendly

According to the latest researches, people are more active on their smartphones, and it is the only device providing maximum engagement. Mobile-friendly websites rank better in the SERPs. So make sure your website is mobile friendly and easily accessible.

8) Free Reporting Platforms

Tracking the traffic on your website is a really important part of SEO. Google has provided free reporting platforms, Google Analytics and Google Console, to track the performance of the website on the Google searches. Google Analytics helps you to track the location of a user, the page on which the user has been active, as well as which type of traffic it is, i.e., referral, organic, paid (display and search), direct, social, etc.

On the other hand, Google Console helps in tracking the source of the backlinks you get, the status of Sitemaps as well as Robots.txt, the performance of the clicks, impressions, CTR, average position of the search queries, webpages. With the help of Google Search Console, you can also track the country and the device from which the traffic is coming. It can also check the errors like the 404, blocked pages by Robots.txt and shows which page is indexed and which one has been crawled.

9) XML Sitemap

The Sitemap of a website helps the crawlers to follow all the webpages of your website through their links. So from the SEO point of view, it is important to create and update the sitemap of a website as to index your website, the Search Engine must see all your webpages.

10) Robots.txt Is accurate

A part of the robots exclusion protocol (REP), Robots.txt tells the web robots on how to crawl and index a particular webpage. It is created through the webmasters, and every time the search engine is about to visit your website, it will check the Robots.txt file.

11) Site Architecture

A better site architecture of a website helps the crawlers to move from one page to another quickly and make a copy of every page. Those copies of the web pages are stored in the index, and whenever the users search for something, the crawler checks it in the Index.

12) 404 Pages

The 404 appears when a user enters a wrong URL, or the website does not have a page with the same URL, it had given to the text, on which a user had clicked. Getting the 404 pages is not bad, as it does not always appear because of the fault of the website owner. But at the same time, it can be a turn off for the site visitors and can hurt the SEO of the website.

First of all, you need a great design for your 404 webpage. To prevent the visitors from clicking that back button on receiving the 404 error, you must add several informative links on the 404 page, such that the visitor does not leave the website. The reason being, if the visitors go back to the Google searches due to the occurrence of the 404 error, and click other links in the searches, it indicates Google that your content is not adding any value and if it happens repeatedly, your ranking is hurt badly.

13) SSL Plugins

Most of the people are not sure that the data they post on various websites is secure or not. It happened only a few years ago when Google announced HTTPS as a ranking signal. But still, only 1% of the websites have implemented this SSL certificate on to it. The HTTPS brings extra security between the browser and the server, adding an additional layer for the security of the data like the credit or the debit card information. This helps the site visitors to trust the website, and share their personal information on it.

14) Structured Data

Like the SSL, most of the marketers are not aware of Structured Data, or we say Schema.org, and only a smaller percentage of website owners are using them. With the help of Structured Data, you can control how your website, and its other entities, must appear in the SERPs. The Structured Data helps the search engine to understand the content of your website and display search results in a specific format. You can manage this result format and show the highlights, like good reviews as the snippet, for the search results. This makes the search results look richer, and this is why these richer results are also called rich results or rich snippets. Since Structured Data helps the search engines to understand your content better, it helps with the ranking of your website.

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1. Google Panda Update: Google rolled out the Panda Update in February 2011. This algorithm Update has been the most powerful since the time it was introduced. This Update makes sure that any website which is already good at the SERPs, does not have any poor quality, spun or copied content. If there is any website with such flaws, Google automatically reduces the ranking of those websites. The Update also helps the website with quality content go up in the rankings. So clearly, to fight the Google Panda Update, you must get rid of the duplicate content on your website.

2. Google Penguin Update: The next major update from Google was introduced in April 2012, i.e. Google Penguin Update. Initially known as the webspam algorithm update, the Penguin Update targets the websites with low-quality and spammy backlinks and reduces their Google ranking. In this way, Google helps in the higher ranking of websites with trustworthy and relevant inbound links.

3. Google Pirate Update: The Google Pirate Update was released in August 2012. The Update deranks the website with pirated content and backlinks. This Update restricts the website that hosts the copyrighted and pirated content, like movies, music, ebooks, as well as software, or the ones which have received the copyright infringement reports under Google’s DMCA system, from ranking higher in the Google searches.

4. Google Hummingbird Update: This Update was introduced in August 2013. Like the hummingbird, this Update is responsible for faster and accurate search results. Google’s Humming Bird Update targets on providing better searches for the users by understanding the intent of the search and by not, specifically, going for the keywords. This lets the users enter the searches more naturally, and the website with the best match content and the ‘intent’ of the searches, appear up in the searches.

5. Google Pigeon Update: Google released the Pigeon Update in July 2014. The Update is crucial for the search result based on location and distance. The Update provides more accurate and more relevant searches, and ties Google’s local search algorithm to their web algorithm, more closely. In this case, SEO is used to rank local and non-local Google results.

6. Google Mobile-Friendly Update: This is a mobile-friendly ranking algorithm, which was introduced by Google in April 2015. As the name suggests, the Update helps in the better ranking of the mobile-friendly web pages, in the mobile search results. The Mobile-Friendly Update is also known by other names including mobilegeddon, mobilepocalyse, mopocalypse and mobocalypse. This is a page-level-factor, and even a single web page from a website, which is mobile friendly, can be ranked in the mobile searches.

7. Google RankBrain Algorithm: Introduced in October 2015, this Update is the machine-learning AI system, that helps Google to decipher and understand the meaning of one of the rare queries and provide relevant results. The Rank Brain Update includes a query processing as well as ranking component and is able to learn from the previous processes, improving itself for the next processes. This Update is the third most important ranking factor of Google.

8. Google Possum Update: Google’s Possum Update was launched in September 2016. The Possum Update is the name for the various changes in Google’s local ranking filter and works for the local business listings in the SERP results. The search results in the Possum Update depends on the physical location of the user. The closer the business is to the user’s physical location, the high the website will be ranked in the searches. The Possum Update also gives different results for different keywords and even includes a similar type of businesses located outside the city, in the searches.

9. Google Fred Update: Released in March 2018, Fred is Google’s Algorithm that targets at the websites which violate Google’s webmaster guidelines, and the ones having the poor quality content. The Update works to penalize the website with heavy ad monetization tactics and which are built to generate ad or affiliate revenue. To avoid hitting by this algorithm, you must ensure that your website is following the webmaster guidelines, and use quality-content while targetting the revenue through ads on the website.

So these are the major Google Updates that boost or reduces the ranking of a website. The basis for hitting by any of those Google Updates can be poor quality content, copied content, keyword stuffing, spammy backlinks, thin content, ad-centred and affiliate heavy content, etc. So make sure to update your website, accordingly, to avoid hitting by any of the mentioned Updates and help your website with better SEO.

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Just using the images on the website does not work for the SEO, but defining the various attributes like alt text, captions, image name, etc., are the key to image SEO. Since the SE crawlers cannot see the images, these attributes help them to get all the details about the image and how it is related to the content of the website, resulting in a better ranking of the website in the searches.

So images are one of the important assets of SEO, and here are the tips that you can follow for the better image SEO:

1) High Quality & Original Images: Using high-quality images on a website makes the website look more attractive and enhances the user experience. Also when the images are original, i.e. belong to your company itself, it puts a great impact on the user of the site. Original images do not need a high-budget setup, but you can get those images by yourself using a good camera. And, for the infographics or other images, you can take the help of a good designer who can design high-quality pictures for you. Also, many website owners use stock photos on their website, which is great as they pay a good amount for those pictures. But do you know, there are other people also, who spent money on the same pictures? So to avoid any kind of duplicity, try to produce your own pictures for the website instead of taking them from any stock websites.

2) Relevant Images: Your website talks about selling clothes, but you have put the food pictures on it. Does it make any sense? No! Right? In the case of images, it is quite simple. The image must represent the context of the textual content on the web page. The images are more expressive and are helpful in simplifying the complex content into a simple form. Using wrong images on your website can turn off the visitors.

3) A Big No to the Copyright Images: The other reason to use original pictures, on your website, is to avoid the copyright conflict that can occur when you use some random pictures from the internet. Copyright claims on the images are not good for your website, and also for you, as you can get into an expensive lawsuit. The companies that own the pictures can issue a notice for not taking their permission to use the images, which is valid under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). And this is not only for the images, but the same goes for the other content on the website too.

But in any case you are unable to create relevant images for your content, you can simply search for copyright free images on Google (using the Usage Rights too in the Google search) or try to write down the credits for the pictures whenever you use them.

4) Choose the Right File Type: Choosing the right file type for the images is also another important part of Image SEO. Commonly, there are three most used file types, i.e., jpg, png and Gif. All the three types are slightly different from each other but fall in the same category. The png files render the highest resolution of all, but at the same time, they have the biggest file size too. So most of the people use the jpg format of the images, as they provide high resolution at the smaller file size. But in case of the designed graphics, both gif and png are the better choices. So try to choose the file type for the images according to the content on the website.

5) Image Size and Hosting: Another prime factor in Image SEO, is the size of an image, as the page load time for a website depends on it. The bigger size of the image is a major agent in slowing down the page load time for the website. According to the researches, on a new website, the users wait for the site to load only for ten seconds and leave the site immediately. So for better user engagement, one must maintain the page load time to its lowest. As image size plays a big role in the same, you must optimize the size of the image every time using a new image on the website. The images can be resized or compressed to an extent, using various tools, keeping the quality of the image intact.

6) Naming the Images: Naming the images might look an easy task, but then is also the most critical one. In the Image SEO, the name of the images has its own role to play. While naming the images, try to choose a name which is relevant to the content. Or you can simply use the target keyword along with the content related name of the image, making it a descriptive one. The image name is not visible to the users, but it is helpful in providing the content information to the search engines.

7) Captions & the Alt Text: Alt Text or the Alternate Text is another most important constituent in the Image SEO. Using the alt tags carefully is beneficial to the overall on-page SEO strategy. Most of the search engines are text-based, and when the image takes longer to load, or in the case, does not even display, it is the Alt text that appears on the screen, and the SE reads it. When there is no alt text given for the images, in the same situation, the screen appears as an empty space to the search engine, which affects the SEO of the website. Like the name of the image, the alt text also should be relevant to the content. You can create a descriptive alt text having SEO-friendly keywords in it.

8) Image Sitemap: For better SEO, creating a sitemap is a common thing, but did you know that Google also encourages creating a sitemap for the images used on the website for better search engine ranking? You can add the images to the sitemap, or you can create a separate sitemap for the images. It helps the search engines to add those images to the index, such that the images also show up in the searches. Using the image sitemap, the crawlers find those images and the information embedded with them, most likely. This increases the visibility of your images as well as the website on which those images have been used.

Following these tips, you can encourage your website’s load time, increase the visibility of the images in the searches, and most importantly, help in the Search Engine Optimaization of the website.

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Lack of Well-Written Content: There is a sea of eCommerce websites on the web, and here, your content will help you make your own place. You must prepare the content after proper research on the product and highlight its main features. A well-written content may not be entirely responsible for grabbing all the traffic, but yes it definitely will make people be more attentive towards what your website is trying to sell.

Improper Keyword Research: Keyword research is one of the most crucial tasks in SEO. So not performing the same for your eCommerce business, can be a huge risk and lead you to failure. So doing proper keyword research is the prime thing to do for a good SEO ranking of your website.

Keyword Stuffing: There are a few major components of the content on the website, including the headings, meta descriptions, product descriptions, the real website content, etc. Most of the people think that more they use the keywords in those, the more the chances be that the website will be ranked higher in the SERPs. But this is completely wrong. Keywords are important, but stuffing the content with the keywords will lead to spam.

Duplicate Content: Whether it’s SEO for an eCommerce Website, or for any other website, duplicate content is never going to help you get the desired traffic. Even most of the products in a category are similar. So you need to create a distinct title as well as the description for the product, that defines the product in an attractive way. Try to write a keyword-friendly title and a keyword-friendly description for the product such that the product gets crawled higher on the Google search.

Not Using Social Media Platforms: Thanks to the Smartphones and the easily accessible internet that people spent most of their time scrolling on the various social media platforms. This habit of people has resulted in making big eCommerce companies to use the same for showcasing their products on them such that they can now reach more people with lesser efforts.

Marketing is what your eCommerce website is supposed to do, and using the various social media platforms to endorse your products and services will be an addition to your marketing strategy.

Lack of a Blog: Content is the king and what else would be the better way of getting more content onto your website than setting up a blog. The context of the blog and the articles in the blogs must be relevant to the service you are providing through your eCommerce website. The articles in it can be from your technical team or from the famous influencers, such that updating the blogs regularly will lead your website to more traffic.

Compromising the Security: The eCommerce sites hold the most sensitive data of its user, including their name, email address, address as well as the payment method and its details. So the security is the major concern you have to take notice of. If you are hosting an eCommerce website, you are bound to provide the highest of the security to data of your users.

So, you must adopt SSL security encryption, most preferably, Extended Validation SSL (EV SSL) certificate and HTTPS for your e-commerce website.

Poor Website Loading Speed: You must admit that unless it is too important, you can’t stay on a website that has a poor page loading speed. Most of the people go off the website within merely 8-10 seconds, if it does not load faster. They might wait for a while in case they really want to get the information stored on the page, or in case of an eCommerce website, there is a huge sale on it. So with a poor website load time, you cannot expect any new person to stay on the website and wait till it is loaded properly. So you must optimize your page loading speed, in order to make the shoppers stay on your website.

No Product Reviews: The user reviews are really helpful in hiking the SEO ranking. Genuine product reviews play a vital role in the success of every eCommerce website, as the reviews are the best way to ensure the authenticity of your products. The better the reviews, the more you are able to build trust among your customers. Lack of reviews may create doubts in the mind of shoppers, and there are high chances that might decide on not investing in a certain product or service on your website.

So, you must have a feedback form on your website that the buyers can fill after they punch in the successful delivery of the product, or you can send your buyers personal automated emails for the feedback.

The competition in the eCommerce industry is growing day-by-day, and there is no time to make mistakes. Even if your product is an outstanding one, you must focus on the better SEO techniques and keep yourself updated with Google’s algorithm to attain higher search engine ranking.

The post 9 SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid for the Growth of Your eCommerce Website appeared first on Xornor Technologies.