Natural referencing or SEO generates targeted traffic to your web pages or your website. Its goal is to put your page or website on the first Google page to give it more visibility.
If you're looking to build the digital presence of your business or just looking to win new customers on the web, SEO is important.
Before taking you through 7 steps to get the most out of an SEO strategy, we offer you a historical tour on the subject
Definition of SEO and its history
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the discipline that helps bring qualified and free traffic to a website. This traffic comes from search engines and allows web pages and Internet users to achieve their goals.
SEO, as the name suggests, is free. Although it's closely related to Google and following its algorithm, it's not an invention stemming from Google.
Indeed, natural referencing comes from the Mermex system which is a conception of the scientist Vannevar Bush. In 1945, the latter had developed a theory allowing the collection, extraction and insertion of shareable data. He had also set up a system of links between different information.
Then it took almost half a century for his theory to be implemented. This is what made it possible to see various web development and search engine initiatives during the 1990s. As the search results were not of good quality, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were able to position themselves. In the late 1990s, their PageRank technology took into account both keywords and website quality. SEO has grown in importance since then and is constantly evolving.
The advantages of good SEO
It's important to have a good SEO for your website in order to have maximum traffic and therefore visits. Good SEO allows your website to appear in the top positions on Google.
Optimizing your website is of utmost importance. On one hand, it boosts your visibility among search engine results. On the other hand, it reinforces the quality of the traffic generated over the long term.
Good SEO also improves the conversion rate of your pages. The more your pages are optimized, the more they will perform and the more your return on investment will be optimal.
How do I know if the SEO of my website is good or not ?
A website helps inspire trust and helps control your online communication. But often, there are SEO issues on your site that you don't even know about. These elements below can be obstacles to a good SEO:
- A website that doesn't monitor traffic
- A lack of conversion
- A poor ranking of the site in the search engines
- Lack of statistics on the website
- A lack of optimization of your pages
These different points are a brake for good visibility of your website. It's therefore imperative to correct these dysfunctions in order to boost your site and thus generate traffic.
How to improve the natural referencing of my site
SEO is closely linked to Google, to the point that we sometimes speak of "Google referencing". So if you want to improve your site's referencing on your own, you need to understand the way Google works.
For example, you need to adopt responsive design in order to adapt your site to all screens. Also, you have to improve the loading speed of your site by reducing the weight of the web page. You can check your loading speed on Google PageSpeed.
Also, good natural referencing requires that you choose keywords with a high number of queries.
Finally, it's important to create good quality content to participate in the good positioning of your website. You need people to click on your content.
7 steps to good natural referencing of a website
Here's 7 steps for good natural referencing of a site:
1. SEO technical audit
The SEO audit of a website is the first step to a good natural referencing. If this sounds new to you, we suggest you leave it to a SEO agency. At 8P Design for example, we provide you with an overview of the general performance of your site's natural referencing. This inventory is necessary to identify areas for improvement and organize your SEO strategy around priority actions with strong positioning.
2. Establish a keyword strategy
You need to put in place a good keyword strategy based on keywords related to your brand and long tail keywords in order to optimize your pages.
3. Technical optimization of the site
It's important to do the technical optimization of your site in order to make it easier for robots to understand the site and its indexing by search engines. Some technical elements are the HTML markup, structured data and metadata, your URLs including the domain name, internal and external mesh, security elements (https: //), page redirects, etc.
4. Content optimization
Optimizing your content is essential because it makes it easier for search engines to crawl and increases site visibility.
5. Optimization of the user experience (SEO and UX)
This goes without saying, since SEO is precisely more user-oriented and no longer focused on search engine robots. You already hear about SXO optimizing the user experience as if to say SEO integrated into UX (user experience). Optimization of the user experience is therefore necessary to ensure that users have the best browsing and reading route when they visit your website.
6. Netlinking
This is a fundamental step in SEO which allows you to multiply the leading hypertext links to a website in order to improve the visibility of your site.
7. Monitoring
This step allows you to know your positioning on the display results of Google. Thus, you are able to follow and also detect if there are any problems with deindexing or loss of ranking of your website.
In sum,
The implementation of a good natural referencing requires the experience of an SEO agency both on the technical side and on your content. The latter offers you its natural referencing services to improve the visibility of your business and maximize the returns (ROI) of your website.
An SEO agency in Montreal helps you optimize the technique, content and links to go up in Google search results.