Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a tool you can and should be using to gain visibility for your website. When used correctly, SEO will increase site rankings on search engines. Because search engines are the primary way people find the information they’re looking for on the internet, these increased rankings will increase traffic to your site and boost your visibility. It is fair to say, therefore, that good SEO is vital to a successful online presence and cannot be ignored.
If you are new to SEO, the task may seem extremely daunting. How can you best position your site to be ranked highly by a computer algorithm? It is a complicated process, to be sure, but there are a few things you can do that will make a difference.
KEYWORDS
Keywords might more accurately be referred to as key phrases since effective ones usually consist of a string of words. What those words ought to be is a complicated puzzle. You must consider the product you’re trying to market and the people to whom you wish to sell. What phrases might they enter into a search engine if they were looking for your product or service?
An important facet of choosing keywords is that you want a phrase for which you’re able to rank highly. If you own a small independent bookstore, simply using the word “bookstore” is unlikely to work—your ranking will never compete with that of the big chains. A phrase like “used bookstore in [Your City]” is much more likely to get traction and get you noticed.
Once you’ve got your keywords selected, you want to give them a presence on your site. Embed them in both the front end content and in the back end, in the title and meta description of your page. Be careful not to simply stuff in keywords at the expense of coherent writing, though. Not only does this make your page look sloppy to viewers, but search engines can also tell when a creator has done something like this and will penalize you for it.
LINK BUILDING
Because the structure of the internet is a web, connectivity between your site and other related sites is highly important to your SEO. We call the process of establishing this connectivity link building. Google has stated that link building is one of the most important factors when establishing site rank.
You can get started establishing links for your page by including a lot of links on your site to external relevant sources. As you do this, it’s important to select sites with high authority to link to. You can use tools like Ahrefs to measure the authority rank of any site on the internet and weed out the lower-ranking ones. You also want to make sure the sites you link to are highly relevant to your own site’s interests. If you are a bookstore, it doesn’t help you very much to link to a website offering plumbing services.
The second step to link building is establishing backlinks—links from other sites to yours. The best way to do this is by creating great content and marketing it well. If you get it in front of the right people, they are likely to include links to it on their own site.
CALL IN THE EXPERTS
When it comes to a successful SEO campaign, keywords and link building are just the beginning. You’ll also want to conduct a review of your site to make sure it’s structured to be crawled by search engines, and if it isn’t in good shape, you’ll want to overhaul it. You’ll also need to ensure that a mobile-optimized version of your site is available since that’s something Google favors. And there are numerous small tweaks that can be made to any site to increase its search ranking.
To take full advantage of your SEO opportunity, consult with a team of experts. We can’t wait to put our experience to work for you!
