Every business should make Search Engine Optimization an important goal within their marketing strategy. A beautifully designed website without good SEO is like a million dollar home on an island that nobody has access to. Simply put, SEO means finding different ways to increase the appearance of your site in search results, leading to more traffic to your website.
There are many companies and professionals that claim to know all the secrets and specialize in SEO but as a small to medium sized business you should always start with the basics. Here are my favorite SEO related tips!
Five Basic SEO TIPS to Improve your Search Engine Ranking
1: Understand Where You Stand
If you don’t know where you are, how do you know where you’re going? Or better yet, how do you know if what you are doing is working? You should always be keeping an eye on your page ranking and your google analytics. Knowing where your visitors are coming from and what pages they are viewing is critical to learning how to best hold their interest.
2: Keywords are Key
Understand that keywords are just a way for users to discover your content. When picking and using your keywords you should have two things in mind; what information does my audience want and what information do the search engines want that will direct an audience to me? Not sure what your keywords are? In depth research should be done through close observation of page and post views and responses, but in the meantime, what would you google if you were looking for the particular products and services you offer? Those are your keywords!
3: Link Back to Yourself
Don’t look too much into this. Do exactly as it states, link back to yourself within your website. When you are adding a new page or a new article include links to other pages within your website. You should have multiple internal links throughout to aid in SEO.
4: Create a Site Map
A site map will allow the search engines to easily crawl your website. The fewer clicks that it takes to get to a page on your website, the better it is.
5: Use Search-Friendly URL’s
This is a mistake that many new web designers and website owners make. A page name is just like a title of a movie, it should describe what the movie or page is about. This tells the search engines what information can be found on that page and will make your website that much more relevant for those particular keywords. For example: www.examplesite.com/325433/tmslt is bad and www.example/articles/basic-seo-tips is good.
That’s all I have for today but look forward to more posts on my favorite SEO tips soon!
