Technology · March 17, 2020

SEO optimization: 6 criteria to reference your website

Guarantee of visibility, a good natural referencing, it works. Quality content, keywords, tags, links … search engines have many criteria for referencing a site, and some of them are constantly evolving. However, there are basic rules and techniques essential to optimizing your site for good SEO: we tell you everything!

I – What is SEO optimization?

SEO or Search Engine optimization – of a site brings together all the techniques that improve the natural positioning of a site in search engine results pages. They are based on the criteria of relevance for referencing followed by the robots of the search engines.

When a user makes a request to a search engine, the engine robots – Google for example – search the web for the most relevant information based on the words searched by the user. We are talking here about natural referencing , as opposed to paid referencing: here it is a question of respecting the natural referencing system by robots, and not of paying to have the site placed at the top of the results page, such as ads and sponsored links for example.

II – The essential points of SEO optimization

On page SEO

1 – The content

Logically, for your website to be offered by the search engine, its content must be related to the request of the user: the words used by the user must be found in the content of the site is , for engines, the sign that the content has a good chance of giving the information that the internet user is looking for.

To optimize your content in this sense, it is better to know the keywords used by the Internet user you want to attract to his site – the target. Do a keyword research to identify, using tools such as Google Keywords Planner or Google Adwords.

It is a matter of being as close as possible to the problems of the target, to provide a solution. In addition to having the right keywords , your content should be interesting, well structured and well written, and updated regularly.

2 – The technique

A major criterion of the engines is the cleanliness of the HTML code, and its compliance with the standards in force of the HTML 5 and CSS 3 codes . They are a language as such, responding to specific codes: it is the language spoken by the engines, and if they cannot read your site, they will leave it aside!

Take care to structure your text using the title tags – h1, h2, h3 – and complete the meta description tags with constructed sentences: remember to place your keywords in the tags consistently!

The download speed is also an optimization point. It depends on the performance of the server, but also on any caches. The cache is a recording of static site data, directly in the user’s computer for browser caches: this data is not read by the engine on each request, which saves time on display, therefore to make navigation easier. Caches are managed from HTML coding, by tags to be placed in the <head> section of the page.

3 – The user experience

Anything that promotes good navigation for the user is a positive point for SEO NYC: a responsive site that can be viewed from different media, loading speed, clear navigation, a site map, securing the site by an SSL certificate .

Off page SEO

4 – Confidence

Is your site trustworthy? Google benchmarks based on the confidence that can be placed in a site, formalized by an index, the Trust Rank . From 0 to 10, it is calculated from multiple technical criteria such as human: authority, bounce rate, seniority, renewal, audience, number of pages on the site.

5 – Links

A search engine like Google also takes into account the quality and the number of incoming links to a site, as well as the anchor texts : the anchor text also called “anchor text” is the clickable text which points to the URL of another page. It must be clear, concise, relevant, and ideally, include a keyword on which the site must be positioned.

6 – Social signals

Sharing publications and sharing links, “likes” on Facebook and Re-tweets, on social media, interactions, relationships are all information for good referencing by search engines . Without having a systematic impact at the robot level, it is always beneficial for the natural referencing of a site to be talked about, and more specifically through networks. Invite to share, promote the virility of your content with easy-to-share formats such as info graphics, or videos: social signals are an opportunity to generate a maximum of inbound links to your site.

Keywords used, structure and tags, interest in social networks, before producing your content, have you thought about optimization for natural referencing by search engines? For each of your content, keep an eye on the points to respect!