There are several factors to consider when building a website for your business. An easy to use navigation bar, a mobile friendly page, and useful contact information are some of the basics when building your presence online, but will your audience find your business easily? This is when Search Engine Optimization comes into place. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of optimizing your website to appear on search engines top pages and turn visitors into customers. Major commercial search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing can effectively route traffic to your site and potentially turn visitors into customers if you build your site with SEO in mind. So how do you turn SEO into your new marketing strategy? There are a few key best practices to keep in mind while creating or updating a business site.
1. Focus On Your Audience
SEO is a process, which means you will need to be patient before you see results. Focus on writing original content for your website with your audience in mind. Let them know what you do and makes you stand out from the rest. Include highly effective key words that will bring your target audience to your site because that’s what they are searching for. For example, someone is looking for “Kids party halls” on Google. Google will direct the potential customer to sites that have content, keywords, tags and headlines that contain those words. If your target market is typing those words to look for businesses similar to yours, then you want to make sure you include them in all your SEO efforts.
This doesn’t mean that you must limit yourself to only using those keywords. SEO is more complex than that. Writing real and useful information is also important because your audience is reading, not just the search engine. Creating effective content does make difference. So, don’t try to fool the systems that these search engines utilize, which are called logarithms, or formulas because they know the difference between articles that actually provide valuable information to their visitors and those that are not useful. Therefore, make sure your content and articles include key words that connect you and the audience through the search engine and the information you provide is true and valuable to the reader. The most visited pages will rank higher and gain a place on top of the results. When people search more difficult questions, such as “Recommendations for great Italian cuisine”, the search engine will search in a more complex way by using your location, day and time and relevancy to fit your needs.
2. Aim For A Higher Ranking
A higher ranking given by a search engine can earn you a place at the top of the search results. Several factors are taken into consideration to be at the top of the list, but exactly which ones? Well according to Searchmetrics.com, a top position can be achieved at the on Google if the page is developed for both humans and search engines, is readily accessible, and easy to consume and optimized from a technical standpoint. Technical factors such as the size of the files, website loading time, HTTPS encryption security for commercial sites, internal and external links, the architecture of the site, and mobile-friendliness are key to higher rankings. Building a website with too many links, videos, information and not having fast loading times can backfire. Remember, simple is better, too much content on your website can cause your link to slow down and take longer to open, which means people will not sit and wait for it to load. Visitors want easy, accessible and fast information at the tip of their fingers.
The type of website you own or will own also matters. If you have a commercial site you can always find tips on how to develop a secure and fast site. If you have an informational site, and are looking for more exposure, focus on getting reviews from other reliable sites. You don’t need to pay for expensive advertisement on other websites as remaining genuine and honest to the reader is more important. If other websites find your information helpful and provide a link to visit your page, it can create traffic between them to you. This benefits both of you, because Search Engines provide “points” for being honest and helpful. In addition, if you provide helpful links to other useful sites that will benefit you with higher rankings too. If you pay untrusting websites to mention your site, you will only create spam and will not rank too high. This only results on being penalized, so don’t try it if you care about your website. Create a natural relation to other websites to encourage them to engage on your website as well.
3. Monitor Progress
If you’ve already started on the steps to optimize your website on a search engine you should be monitoring your progress. Not only can you check on some of the most popular search engines to see if your ranking has changed over a month, but you can check your backlinks to see who is linking to you. There are websites specialized on tracking your backlinks, such as who linked to you, who unfollowed your link or who removed it. Backlinks are one of your main ways of checking your progress but it can also protect you from negative SEO attacks, such as spam links to your cite. Competitors will sometimes act against you instead of focusing on themselves; therefore you must stay up to date to who links to you. If you find yourself in a situation like this you can create a report against it right away but most likely they will be penalized without you having to worry about it. Google algorithms are quite good at penalizing spam sites, so take advantage of tools such as Webmaster Tools and Analytics. These tools will give you advice and tips for your next move and the best part? They’re free! Learn to use these techniques and see who is visiting your site, what is going wrong and use a map to see where they are clicking from the most. If you want to see results you have to do the work.
SEO is Here to Stay
Search Engine Optimization is an evolving marketing technique you could be using in your favor. It takes time to see results and what worked for you yesterday might not work for you today, but using the information in this post could protect you from lagging behind. Focusing on your audience, aiming for higher rankings, and monitoring your progress are only the beginning. SEO techniques are here to help and keep your site relevant and useful for your audience.
