Every single business that has a website needs to be concerned and aware of search engine optimization or SEO. SEO is basically aimed at getting your web pages as high as possible on a Google search or any search engine result page. SEO is essential to business growth in the modern age. Good SEO drives traffic to your site and relevant pages, and in turn drives business growth through sales and exposure. You can hire SEO professionals to help your efforts, but there are some things that you can do yourself to get started on the right path to success.
5. Focus on Keywords
First you must determine what your relevant keywords are. If you are a bakery, then your keywords will revolve around baked goods and things of that nature. Once you determine which keywords are best for your business, you need to make sure that they are spread out throughout your site, pages, and blogs. You want to make sure that you do not “overstuff” your pages with the keywords you chose or else your page will more likely than not be marked as spam and not show up in the top results page. Good keywords are things that people are likely to search. In our above example perhaps something like local bakers, bakery, donuts, bread, etc.
4. Internal Links
One of the most basic SEO strategies that works effectively is internally linking your own pages on your site. This is an effective way to boost the traffic to individual blogs or pages on your website. Practice linking back or archiving links to past content in all of the new content that you create and publish. Remember, do not over link your pages. One or two per article is a good place to start.
3. Easy to Search URL’s
When navigating through your website the URL may look something like this, bakerygoods.com/112t.htm Obviously, this is not memorable or easy to search. However, if you make your internal links easier to read and understand something like this perhaps, bakerygoods.com/donuts/recipes not only is it a lot more memorable to the user, but it is also easier for them to search in the future if and when they want to come back to your web page. Making your URL’s as appealing as possible is a simple thing to do, and yet, it can yield huge results in your SEO efforts. On the Internet every little bit counts.
2. Great Content
There is probably no better way to really make a splash with your SEO efforts than to create and publish great content. People want to read, see, watch, and hear great online content. They want to search it and they want to share it with their friends and family. The more you update your content and keep it fresh and exciting the higher you will rank on search engine results. Want to know the best way to make sure that your page is always getting fresh new content? Incorporate a blog! Not only is a blog a great way to reach clients, but it is also a great way to link internal and external pages.
1. Social Media
No discussion of SEO would be complete without addressing social media. To succeed in today’s business world you need to be active on social media as well as publishing fresh content to your web page and blog. These two things work together. It is important to share your new content across your social media platforms in an even manner, making sure that you tailor each post to the specific social media platform being posted on.
This is a great way to get started with SEO, but there is always so much more you can do!