If you recently created a website, you should understand that people won’t know it exists before you take steps to increase its visibility. To get immediate traffic, advertising is very useful, but you also want your site to perform well in organic search results, which is known as search engine optimization (SEO). Here are some basic tips for beginners to help them improve their site’s search engine rankings.

1. Be patient

There are ways to get immediate traffic to your site, but don’t expect search engines to bring a lot of free traffic right away. It takes a while for the major search engines to find your site with crawler software and place it in their site indexes. The amount of time that it will take for your site to receive significant search engine traffic is hard to predict. Be prepared to rely on advertising and social media to bring in your initial online customer base for several months before your site begins to appear at the top of many people’s searches. For more insights, www.seotoronto.company has resources and information available on their website.

2. Create engaging content

Having a clever keyword strategy can’t make up for poor-quality content. Visitor engagement is important to prevent people from quickly “bouncing” away from your site. A page that seems to have more focus on displaying ads than in providing useful information is likely to make people click the back button, and the search engines penalize sites that have this problem by displaying your page lower in the search results.

3. Longer is usually better

Useful content often takes the form of thorough guides that are over 2000 words in length. These types of pages also tend to be shared on social media, and other sites are more likely to link to the page. This is called a backlink, and search engines view these as a strong signal that your site has some value and authority for the topic or industry that is relevant to the information on the page.

4. Site load speed is crucial

One of the factors that impacts your SEO is how quickly your pages load. A page should load almost instantly these days, considering that most people have high-speed broadband and smartphones are equipped with impressive amounts of RAM and multi-core processors.

The main factors for loading speed are image size and URL redirects. Make sure that the image files are not too large and their dimensions match the area where they appear on the page. If your site is being redirected to another URL than the one that users originally surf to, this could also slow the page load time down considerably.