Doing SEO in Nigeria
If you have ever created a website as a Nigerian you would discovered the painstaking effort undertaken in getting visitors to that site. It is easier for most Nigerian business website owners to create a website than to get their sites rank high in search engines; the reason being that SEO has been perceived as a difficult task for most websites and blog owners. In Nigeria online market today where search engine competition had grown to a high level, SEO has become a must learn art or science. Of course, doing SEO in Nigeria is not different from what is obtainable in the rest of the world and anybody can become an SEO expert. Yet, a common Nigeria website owner still finds SEO difficult. In my effort to Guide Nigeria website and blog owners in SEO techniques for better search ranking, driving visitors to their websites and making money online; I decided to share here what I called, ‘Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guide for Nigeria’
What is SEO?
SEO is short for search engine optimization. A methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics applied to increase the number of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in search results page of a search engine (SERP) like Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. SEO aim at boosting your website search engine ranking; that is making your website appear among the top search engine result pages whenever online users search for keywords relevant to your business. It is found that internet users do not click through page results that does appear in first search engine result page, therefore the high a website naturally ranks in organic results of a search, the greater the chances that the site will be visited by an online user.
Through extensive reading, research, experiment, practice, and blogging for ten years, I have learnt the art and science of SEO. There is no single SEO technique, tactics or strategy that will earn your site #1 Google result index page or even any other search engine but a well applied combination of the below SEO techniques and Guide will put your website ranking high on search engine index pages for your site keywords.
What are these SEOs techniques? What are these ultimate Search Engine optimization Guide for a Nigeria online business owner?
Here are the ultimate SEO techniques any Nigeria website and blog owners can apply to increase their searching engine ranking, drive quality traffics to their websites and ultimately earn genuine money online from their business.
1. BUILD A WEBSITE THAT IS FRIENDLY TO SEARCH ENGINES
The extent of your site ranking on search engine is largely dependent on how friendly your website is to search engines. Some few things that make up a good search engine friendly website are;
- Loading speed of your site — if you want your website to rank high on search engine it must be optimize for fast loading time. No matter how beautiful, rich the content of your site is; if the speed of the loading time is poor, chances are that the webpage will never be listed among the first top 10 pages by search engine. Search engine ranking are boosted by how fast a webpage loads. Also, about 35-40% people will pen abandon a site if it is taking much time to load? It is not game saying that web users are impatient people. To add to your predicament, any extra second it takes your page to load will result in about 5% decrease in the rate of conversion.
ACTION: Keep your site simple. Avoid too much animation, images, flash, plug-in, code and rich media. If you’re using themes like wordpress theme for bloggers, use a lighter theme. Use Google’s slick tool and page speed insight to determine the loading speed of your site. Use yahoo tool (Yslow) to grade your webpage based rule of high performance. Use pingdom free page test tool to test the speed of your website. Alert your website hosting server to turn on their Gzip to compress and increase the loading speed of your website.
- HTML Title tag of your Website — HTML title tag has always been and will remain the most important HTML signal that search engine use to determine what your website is all about. So, think about what you hope each of your pages should rank for, craft unique descriptive title for each of your page. If you are blogging on wordpress platform, you can change your title tag into something like this;
<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo(‘name’); }elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo ‘ – ‘ ; bloginfo(‘name’); }
elseif (is_single() ) { single_post_title();}
elseif (is_page() ) { bloginfo(‘name’); echo ‘: ‘; single_post_title();}
else { wp_title(”,true); } ?></title>
This will help search engine index more of blog pages. According SEO analytic tool of Bing, title tags of more than 70 characters is not a well optimize title and I know that Google also penalizes such long title.
ACTION: for better ranking of your website, reduce your site title to less than 70 characters.
- Use of Meta description tag — though SEO experts have arguably stated that Meta description will not increase your website ranking.
ACTION: use of Meta description may not necessary improve your website search engine ranking
- Use of header tags — we have different header tags. The H1 tag, H2 tag……H6 tag. The header tags are formal way to help search engine identify key sections of web pages. The H1 is usually the headline of your page or post. The use of these H tags is dependent on the nature of your site. H1 is the major headline and it matter so much though how much more weight an H1 carries than an H2 tag should not border you.
ACTION: create a really “killer post title” or “wicked page headline” for your website pages. Creating amazing title is huge component of marketing strategies, it really work like magic and search engines are attracted to such title. Pages should have descriptive title that indicates the page structure.
- Website background color, text fonts and Images— your website background color and text fonts may not matter such much to search engine ranking of your websites but it is going to likely affect your website visitors. Image on your website should be clear, well tagged and alt text tag should be use to describe the image. This is very important in search ranking of your website. Search engine like Google can easily index your images when it well tag.
- Website crawlability — your website should be crawlable to be found among the index result book.
ACTION: Add your website sitemap to major search engine like Google and Bing webmaster tool to increase fast index of your website and avoid duplicate content.
2. HAVE QUALITY CONTENT ON YOUR WEBSITE
- Post quality content on your website
Content is king! It is often said, ‘get your content right and you’ve created a solid foundation for all other SEO techniques’ Do you have or post quality content on your website? If you’re selling something, do you go beyond having simple pamphlet with the same old school folktale story that we have on other sites. Do you provide a reason for people to remain on your page for a while than few seconds? Do you offer real value, something of substance to visitors that is unique, different and useful?
- Research relevant keywords and include those keywords on content to rank your site
Perhaps the most important SEO factor that will determine how far you page rank high on search engine is use of relevant keywords.
ACTION: use Google keyword planner, Bing keyword research tool and any other research keyword tool to research relevant keywords for you page. You can also use Google trends and insight tools to get an insight of your keywords. The bottom line is that if you want your page to be found for a particular word, it’s a good idea to actually use those words often, repeat each word at least five times or seek out a keyword density of 2.45%. No no no; that is a costly joke! There is no precise number of times, use common sense.
- Post fresh content frequently
Search engines love fresh and original content. If you have old post content you can update or re-publish it but Google have something called query deserved freshness (QDF). Google usually use it to see if there is new or fresh content and if they find one it will be given a boost in search result. You can use Google trend to get recent happening in Nigeria and then use it to update your website if the information is related or relevant to website. If you’ve got the right content, the right topic at the right time, when QDF hits, you will be on top of search result. You page may be reshuffle latter, you did cause it but it’s just that the article has expired.
- Create and post engagement content
Quality content should be interactive and engaging. For example, how does users stay on you page? Did they search clickthrough to listing but immediately ‘bounce’ back to the result to try something else.
3. USE STRUCTURAL DATA MARK-UP
Search engines recently rely on code that help them understand the different page content and structure with advert of Google Knowledge of Graph and Bing snapshot
4. GET RELEVANT AND QUALITY LINKS TO YOUR WEBSITE
Links have lost some of their values for some reasons; some sites are stingy about linking out and other apply rel=nofollow link to help fight spam. Quality links also value to a page, help in website ranking and when appropriate link text/ anchor text are use for the linking, the page ranks high.
5. LEVERAGE ON SOCIAL MEDIA ADVANTAGE TO RANK YOUR WEBSITE
Social media signal factor are emerging as a ranking factor these days.
6. GOOGLE AUTHORSHIP, TRUST AND BRANDING
Is your site an authority? Is it widely recognized leader in its field or business area. Build on on website and branding. Create Google authorship mark-up to claim your content on the web.
Finally, combining all these SEO techniques I have mention will rank your website high on search engine result page.
SEO= $$$