In this article, you’ll get to know more about:

• What is SEO?
• Essential factors that have a large impact on your website
  • Website Traffic
  • Bounce Rate
• SEO Checklist that every publisher needs to know
  • Basic SEO
  • On-Page SEO
  • Off-page SEO
  • Technical SEO
  • Content SEO
• SEO Glossary

From small-scale publishers to large publishers, the common emphasis is quality content and monetization. But, the focus should next be on the visibility of their content in search engines like Google and Bing. 

The best strategy & extremely effective tool for publishers to achieve higher visibility of the brand, and content is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  

SEO increases organic traffic to your website and ranks on Google ultimately increasing the success through higher page views and higher advertising-led revenue of your website/business.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process of improving and increasing the visibility and traffic to your website when individuals search for a particular kind of content in Google, Bing, and other search engines. 

Essential factors that have a large impact on your website

Website Traffic is the number of visitors to your website which can be human traffic and/or programmatic traffic (bots). Bringing traffic to your website can be through

• Organic traffic is the number of visitors who land on your website naturally from search engine results and not through paid ads. 
• Social traffic is the number of visitors who visit your website from social media networks and platforms like Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. 
• Referral traffic is the number of visitors to your website through the link present in another website
• Paid traffic is the number of visitors to your website from paid ads 

In the competitive digital publishing market, many publishers struggle to appear in organic search results. The investment of budget and resources towards paid traffic / Pay-Per-Click traffic(PPC) may increase the ranking but the sustainability of the traffic is questionable and at the same time it is going to be a loss-making proposition.

Below is a sample metric on how your website will be evaluated. 

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter the website and leave without continuing to view other pages or leave without performing the desired actions on the website. For example, selecting read more, clicking the link, etc. 

Below is the sample data that shows total visits, avg visit duration, pages per visit, and bounce rate.

Reasons for higher bounce rate

• Page doesn’t meet visitor’s expectations or requirement
  • No clarity on content 
  • Answers are not effectively visible to the visitor
  • Page content and Ads content don’t meet the expectations
  • Some content that might annoy the visitor
• Wrong keyword stuffing 
• Low-quality content 
• Page loading time
• No compelling Call-To-Action (CTA) 
• The website is not so mobile friendly

How does it affect Publishers?

• Website Ranking: Affects website ranking and site partnership opportunities
• Ad Monetization:  Ad approvals from demand partners might be affected as advertisers demand more exposure to their content which can’t be satisfied if the bounce rate is higher.
• Search Engine Visibility: Bounce rate can affect the google search ranking of your website, resulting in inaccessible pages to the crawlers

Bounce rate is an important metric for website performance.  Lower the bounce rate better the performance and health of your website. 

SEO Checklist that every publisher needs to know

Above are a few key indicators that help to understand how strategic handling of SEO is important for publishers. 

Let us now understand how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be personalized for your website.

Following are the SEO Checklist to increase your website visibility and traffic 

• Basic SEO
  • Setup Google Search Console
    • To know which keyword ranks high
    • Sitemap submission
    • To fix errors in the website
    • Page performance score and more
  • Setup Bing Webmaster Tools
    • Built-in keyword research tool
  • Setup Google Analytics
    • Website traffic metrics that are received through Google search engine
    • Identify top-performing keywords, pages, posts
    • Page views, bounce rate, average time spent on the page, and more
• On-page SEO is a process of optimizing web pages for specific keywords to increase visibility and traffic. 
  • Include Keyword in URL
  • Using short URLs, helps the website to rank high in search engines than long URLs
  • Use the keyword in front of the title tag
  • Include Title tag modifiers. Title tag modifiers are phrases to add to your title
• Use the keyword 
  • In the first 150 words as Google focuses more on the first 100-150 words
  • In Header H1, H2, H3 tags
• Optimize the images
  • Using alt tags and relevant filenames can help rank in Google Image search. Example: If the image is a photo of a cat, then the Filename - cat.png and Alternative Text - Cute cat on the wall
• Use External Links
  • Including authentic links to trusted websites in the content will make Google categorize your website as trustworthy 
• Use Internal Links
  • Including the link of 2-5 pages on your website
• Technical SEO
  • Is a process of improving and increasing the visibility of a website and its rank in search engines like Google. This enables the site to be easily crawled and indexed. 
• Ensure to use HTTPS
  • Google promotes verified resources (websites with HTTPS encryption) in search engine results. Improvise the site speed 
• Improvise the site speed
  •  Google has provided a free PageSpeed insight tool to check the performance of the website
• Identify and fix crawl errors 
  • A crawl error happens when Google has trouble finding the pages on the site. This affects the rank of the site.
• Ensure the visibility of the page on Google 
  • Use the tool Google Search Console and insert the link of the page to ensure it is visible and available on Google
• Ensure the site is mobile friendly
  • Use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool to confirm whether your site is mobile-friendly or not
• Fix broken link 

Content SEO

Focussing more on keyword strategy doesn’t work. Structured websites and quality content get more traffic naturally.

• Identify trending and popular topic 
• Maximize readability by reducing the number of words. 
• Create clear and detailed content 
• Define Schema for the website
• Include multimedia content like images, videos, infographics, etc. this helps to rank even better with more audience engagement
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

SEO Glossary

Here is the curated list of SEO glossaries to recap the terms that we have come across

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process of improving and increasing the visibility and traffic to your website when individuals search for a particular kind of content in Google, Bing, and other search engines
• a sitemap is a file that contains information about the changes and updates of the page present on a website to the search engines
• Organic traffic is the number of visitors who land on your website naturally from search engine results and not through paid ads
• Social traffic is the number of visitors who visit your website from social media networks and platforms like Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms 
• Referral traffic is the number of visitors to your website through the link present in another website
• Paid traffic is the number of visitors to your website from paid ads 
• Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter the website and leave without continuing to view other pages or leave without performing desired action in the website
• On-page SEO,  is a process of optimizing web pages for specific keywords to increase visibility and traffic
• Technical SEO, a process of improving and increasing the visibility of a website and its rank in search engines like Google