Are you a Business Owner, planning to start or take your online marketing to next level? In that case, you need to understand how a search engine works and its relation to website development. Here is your best SEO company in Bangalore – SocialOrange.

How does Search engine work?

Let’s take an example of Google Search Engine. When you plan to search anything online, most of the people prefer to search on Google. We do hear people suggesting “Google it”  when you are looking for some information. Now the question is why do people say “Google it” and why not search in Bing or Yahoo. For this question, most of the people reply saying that in Google they get the result for their query in first few search results.

Google strives to show the most relevant results to users with the help of ALGORITHMS. Satisfying user queries helps the search engine make people dependent on them for all their online search. Now since people are searching for solutions to their queries on Google, it has become one of the best places for marketers to show their advertisement.

96% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising and according to Google’s income statement, about 70% of its advertising revenues come from AdWords, the rest from AdSense. Hence, Google performs regular algorithm updates in order to provide the search results which meets user requirement.

How does the search engine determine if your website is the right fit to be shown among top search results for user query?

There are many factors that determine this. Here are a few and most important ones of those factors:

1. Crawlable – In order for SE to rank your web page for the keyword, it has to first crawl your website with the help of bots, index the webpage in the SE database and then rank.
2. CTR – Click through rate. How many people click on your website when your site is suggested by the search engine.
3. Bounce rate – How users interact with your webpage. Are they spending more time scrolling or clicking the next page and reading your content, filling up the forms or interacting with the chatbots? Whether the user exits your website immediately? Bounce rate is one of the most important factors for ranking. Lower bounce rate indicates higher user interaction. The lower the bounce rate the better it is. Below mentioned is the checklist to know the reason for the spike in Bounce rate. Check it out!

Current scenario of Search engine optimization

Gone are those days when search engine optimization was related to mostly creating backlinks.

The scenario has completely changed, now web development and SEO go hand in hand. The more user-friendly the website is, the well the webpage ranks in the search engine for the targeted keywords.

Mistakes to be avoided by developers while creating a website

• Duplicate pages – Not consolidating your www and the non-www domain versions. Search engine considers both the domain version as duplicate pages. Hence there is a need to consolidate the two with the help of Search console. 

• 302 redirection – It is suggested to have only 301 redirections for the websites when needed and not 302.

• Dynamic URLs – Avoid Dynamic and relative URL. Make sure URLs are clean, short and do not have a hyphen. If Dynamic URLs are required, make sure its not crawled by bots.

• Page Speed – Most of the time we find websites are not able to get crawled by bots or are not able to rank due to high page load leading to slow website load. Ideally, your website is supposed to load under 2 to 3 seconds in order to have the best user experience.

• Website code – Make sure your website do not have unwanted codes and is well organized.

• Navigation – Understand your customers and create navigation accordingly. Make sure that user can easily reach the desired page without going through many pages.

• Javascript and CSS – Try to minimize Javascript as it increases the webpage load time. Consider minifying Javascript and CSS.  

• Mobile Friendly – Since more people have access to smartphones, making your website mobile friendly is now a necessity. With the increase in mobile users, Google has placed mobile-friendly design in highest priority by coming up with “Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm update”

• Images – Consider optimizing all the image by placing alt text, reduced image size and giving a descriptive file name.

• Content – Generally content comes at a later stage in website development and hence developers do not keep SEO optimized meta title, meta description and H1 tags. It is suggested to sit with the content development team ( if any) or project manager and make a website page layout in accordance with what content will be placed and where. Also, consider placing proper CTA ( call to action ). This will help you to rank higher in the search engine as users find web pages with informative content more useful.

Suggestions for business owners

• Make sure your developers know basics of SEO. It is important to understand how search engine bots work.

• Build a website with the simple and user-friendly design. Make sure you understand your user and make the site structure accordingly.

• Run your website through tools like Google Speed test and GT metrix. It will help you understand the technical flaws of your website and fix it.

• If the website is too old and has too many technical errors, consider revamping the website. Then it becomes very easy to start the SEO campaign and get your website more visitors.

• Prefer hiring agencies to develop your site who also provides digital marketing services. It’s best to create a SEO optimized site right from the beginning instead of creating a website and then going for SEO service.

Now that you know what are the mistakes to be avoided or fixed on your website, share this with your developers or reach out to Social Orange to have a completely revamped and SEO optimized website!