The basics to easily reference your professional site

The basics to easily reference your professional site

You have understood the value of a website for your business, that's good, but making sure that it attracts a large number of visitors is essential! Indeed, the Web is home to a colossal amount of content and standing out from the crowd may seem unachievable. However, by following a few essential principles and devoting a little time to your SEO, you can take full advantage of the opportunities offered by the Internet. Like a point of sale, a professional website must be visible.

• SEO, what is it?
• Content: keystone of good SEO
• Links policy
• Optimize your site for Google
• Keywords and natural referencing: working on your "long tail"
• Update your site regularly

SEO, what is it?

Very broadly, the referencing of a website refers to the means that Internet users have of finding it, either through search engines or through links. A well-referenced site will therefore be more easily accessible to Internet users looking for information related to this site.

SEO marketing, for its part, includes all the tools and techniques that allow the site in question to be visible to Internet users: indexing by search engines, free or paid links, directories, free keywords or sponsored links. ..

Content: keystone of good SEO

• The first thing to take care of, and certainly the most important for a site to gain an audience, is the quality of the content. Internet users who have been captivated by the information you give them will not hesitate to talk about your site. On the other hand, search engines take into account the time spent by visitors on your site. Thus, by offering interesting content, we generate both prescription and better indexing.
• To optimize its referencing, it is useful to integrate in its content keywords likely to be searched by Internet users constituting the target of the site. The presence of keywords representative of the activity of the site is essential for good indexing by search engines. However, entering keyword sets without tails and heads is counterproductive. Indeed, the indexing robots now locate these lists of words which were intended for them. On the other hand, it considerably harms editorial quality and invariably scares Internet users in search of quality information.
• By content, we must also understand ergonomics and visual quality. To retain Internet users and increase the number of page views, a site must be user-friendly and easy to use. Regarding indexing, it is essential to give an explicit title to each page as well as to design a coherent tree structure.

Links policy

• Directories: there are a large number of directories specialized on a subject or generalist. To be listed in directories, you can choose two strategies:
  • Qualitative strategy: we scrupulously select the relevant directories in relation to the theme of the site to be referenced and their Page Rank (the Page Rank is the confidence index attributed to a site by Google). This allows you to increase your own Page Rank and to attract an audience genuinely interested in its content to your site. However, this will only offer a limited number of backlinks and visits.
  • Quantitative strategy: we seek to be referenced by as many directories as possible. It can take a long time to do manually, but robots exist although their effectiveness is limited. You will get a large number of backlinks and visits but of poor quality and can lower your Page Rank.
  • Links being a very important factor in the positioning of a website, there are different techniques for obtaining links.
  • Partnerships policy:

This involves directly making link exchange requests to webmasters of other sites. This has the effect of both redirecting visitors directly to your site and improving your indexing in search engines. In the same way as for directories, and with the same effects, we can: either focus on the quality or the quantity of link exchange requests. To optimize the chances that a request will be accepted, we will make sure to send the webmaster concerned a courteous and well-argued request, even if this should take a little longer. Creating partnerships between sites with similar or complementary content can be formidable.

For example, a diet blog might benefit from partnering with sports blogs or organic food vendors. This creates a mini network which refers Internet users' visits to nearby centers of interest.

Optimize your site for Google

If it is not alone in the search engine market, Google is the main player. Thus, having a website well referenced by Google is a major asset for its attendance. This requires a good understanding of how the web crawler works. It would take too long to explain here in detail the means of positioning your site on the first page of Google. SEO is now a profession in its own right. However, there is an abundance of online documentation on this subject. Note that registering your site in the Google Webmaster Tools program can be very instructive. The Web giant indeed provides website owners with very advanced statistical tools to refine its content and to better reference its various pages.

Finally, getting a good SEO is a long-term task, unless you are alone in your industry. It is therefore advisable to be patient, to devote time to it or to resort to the services of a professional.

Keywords and natural referencing: working on your "long tail"

If you are starting your activities on the internet in a competitive sector, it will be difficult to properly reference the content (eg: texts) of your website based on the queries most typed by Internet users.

Choosing simple queries or overly general keywords has two drawbacks:

• You will be competing with millions of search results, so your web pages will be very difficult to access by the game of natural referencing.
• A keyword being unique and not very specific, it does not make it possible to produce differentiating content, and therefore to attract Internet users who are looking for products / services, very specific content.

It is therefore important, at the outset, to work on the “long tail” of its SEO: this notion refers to combinations of keywords which attract few visitors to a website, but which correspond to very specific requests, and therefore to more "qualified" Internet users (who will not come across your site by chance)

To choose long tail keywords: use Google's keyword generator, an interesting tool for choosing the least competitive keyword combinations.

Update your site regularly

Regularly updating your website or blog is essential to promote SEO. This concerns both the content (new pages, new blog articles) and the technical update of the site.

This technical update is particularly important since the obsolescence of part of the site can have a negative impact on the site's SEO. The most recent example is the priority left since 2015 by Google to “mobile-friendly” sites, ie accessible from a mobile device.

Several aspects can be taken into account:

• Ensure the compatibility of the medium with the standards requested by search engines (compatibility with the mobile, page or content loading time, etc.);
• Plan updates based on trends that can help improve SEO: switch to https for example;
• Check that the site is properly secure, by updating the appropriate functionalities (example: extensions on Wordpress or Joomla) to avoid hacking and loss of visibility, or even a penalty for search engines;
• Regularly submit a new sitemap to search engines, especially in the event of new content, and check that the urls are well referenced.

A complete overhaul of a site or blog can contribute to better referencing: first by taking into account new technical requests, but also by being put forward to the community of readers.

Find out more: update your company's website: how and why?