Website Visibility: SEO Techniques to Build Your Online Reputation

Featured image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Competition is intensifying in the online world. Every online business is on the hunt for opportunities to attract customers. Some use social media to drive sales, while others optimize their website for the search engines. Some do both. For all, the aim is better website visibility. When customers can find a business’s website more easily, more conversions and better profitability will soon follow.

In today’s era, search engine optimization (SEO) is the most powerful marketing tool. It puts your brand in front of people who are searching for services like yours, increasing website visibility and boosting sales.

Every search engine has multiple algorithms that change from time to time. The algorithms themselves are based on the website’s loading speed, its mobile-friendliness, its search visibility, and other factors. Regardless, every search engine seeks to offer users the best possible experience.

Therefore, marketers have to keep up with changing algorithms to get their webpage to the top of the results. Initially, this can seem challenging, but don’t let this hold you back. Google offers various tools and applications to lend a hand.

Does this have anything to do with website visibility? Of course it does! If your website meets Google’s requirements, it will rank it higher and its visibility will therefore improve. So start figuring out ways to boost your rankings now.

Here is a complete guide on SEO. Start now to build your website’s reputation and improve its visibility.

1. Learn Link-Building and Enhance Your Website’s Visibility

Link-building is an integral part of SEO, as it plays a significant role in determining a website’s rankings. If you’re seeking to improve your website’s visibility, work to create quality backlinks that direct people toward your webpage.

A backlink is a link from another site. Multiple backlinks increase a brand’s relevance as well as its visibility. They also build authority with search engines. This is because search engines judge your web page’s credibility by tracking its number of backlinks.

The more backlinks you have, the greater your site’s authority. This is called off-page SEO. In short, good off page SEO bolsters your digital reputation, because search engines can then validate your backlink placements across the web.

However, it is even more important to have quality backlinks. In fact, the quality of your backlinks is more important than how many you have. This means you have to determine the source of any backlinks.

Google views links to external sites as a recommendation. This further means the linking site’s reputation is an important consideration as well.

A few years ago, Google started penalizing site owners who used link schemes that were intended to manipulate the algorithms. Google maintains this policy today. Therefore, if you spot links coming from spammy or irrelevant webpages, remove them immediately. They could inhibit your site’s visibility.

Here are a few reliable sources of backlinks.

Guest Posts

Guest posting is the practice of publishing free content on another’s website in exchange for a link to your site. Choose sites that post about topics that align with your niche and your customers’ interests. Additionally, seek to publish with select websites that have good visibility and high domain authority.

Public Relations

Get in touch with reputable bloggers and journalists and ask them to cite your link in the news or other publications. Alternatively, hire a publicist to write press releases and link those to your site.

Infographics and Images

If you have informative images or infographics, insert your links into those.

Once you get the knack of link-building techniques, your website will gain visibility and its rankings will skyrocket.

2. Use Relevant Keywords for Better Website Visibility

Do you know how audiences search for your business? There is a set of words or phrases they use to search for what they want or need on Google.

Your job is to figure out what those words are for your customers and potential customers. Then utilize those words and phrases as your target keywords. Doing so will give your website more visibility.

The only way to find those words is by conducting keyword research. But there are plenty of online tools that can help you with that.

Keyword research will give you some understanding of what topics people care about, along with your audience’s intent. Use online keyword research tools to check each keyword’s search volume. High volume indicates higher rankings, and higher-ranking keywords can make your site more visible.

However, using only keywords that match a person’s search will no longer impress the search engines. Instead, search engines are interested in the intent behind a particular keyword. This is because many words and phrases can have a different meanings beneath the surface. For instance, if a person types in a search for “accident lawyer reviews,” this suggests the commercial intent of hiring a lawyer.

So be sure to use target keywords that have a commercial purpose. This will give your website greater visibility and help you to achieve optimal rankings.

3. Optimize Your Site’s Structure to Make It More Visible to Search Engines

A well-defined structure makes your website straightforward so search engine crawlers can more easily find your site. Good website structure includes better indexing and categorization. These factors make your website more visible and improve your chances of achieving higher rankings.

In other words, instead of stuffing pages onto your website in a disorganized fashion, break them into categories. This will allow Google and the other search engines to understand your site better. Here are some aspects of website structure that have a significant influence on its visibility and rankings.

Loading Speed

These days, people don’t have the patience to wait for a webpage to load. According to a study conducted by Forrester Consulting, a person waits only two seconds for a webpage to load before clicking the back button.

For this reason, Google includes page speed among its ranking factors. So get rid of non-essential elements that slow your site’s speed. These can include images, plugins, and so on. Also, leverage speeding tools to monitor your site’s loading time regularly.

Mobile Friendliness

Optimizing your webpage for a mobile phone sounds like a no brainer in this digital world. But unfortunately, there are still hundreds of webpages not accessible from smartphones. To ensure your website’s visibility to mobile users, test your site’s mobile-friendliness. Also, fix any zoom in and out issues.

Use a responsive theme, update the landing page, and redesign the pop-ups for mobile devices. This is another ranking factor, helping your website to become more visible to audiences.

4. Create and Publish Content Regularly for Greater Website Visibility

In the race for greater visibility and higher rankings, marketers forget they have to generate content for users and not just for the search engines.

You must ensure that your website has valuable and readable content. So lose the jargon and ensure the content you post is something your audience is actually interested in.

But even before you begin a content marketing strategy, write a compelling story for your “about us” page. This will help to build a connection with your audience. Similarly, if you are offering multiple services, link them to individual pages to promote better understanding. This will also boost your website’s visibility.

Moreover, learn about your target audience. Determine their interests and write about topics that will foster engagement. In addition to written content, generate visual content—images, infographics, videos, and the like. These days, people prefer visual content over written information. Because they do, Google ranks websites higher that have visual content.

5. Monitor Your Website’s Stats on the Google Search Console

Despite endless efforts, some webpages don’t make it to the top results. Often, this is because of errors the site owner is unable to identify. If you experience anything similar, leverage the Google Search Console. This is a powerful tool that helps in tracking potential issues that can affect your site’s rankings.

To begin, sign up with your business profile and familiarize yourself with the tool.

It checks for crawling errors like 404-page fail, indicating that Google cannot crawl to your site. It will also offer solutions on how you can fix this problem. Likewise, it detects broken and dead links that can hurt your site’s rankings. Once you are aware of these links, remove them as quickly as you can. Lastly, you can see which keywords people are using to find your website. Utilize these to enhance your visibility.

Final Thoughts

In the vast sea of websites, improving visibility is nothing if not a challenge. But instead of submitting your site to 100 search engines and flooding domains with keywords, optimize it for Google. Google stores information in its databases and uses web crawlers to find sites.

Additionally, it has more than 100 algorithms for weighting websites and giving each one an overall score. Therefore, if you optimize your page adequately, Google will rank your site fairly in the top results.