Owning or designing a Website with no SEO strategy in place is much like trying to build a house with no roads or sidewalks that lead to it. You hear the buzzwords like “search engine optimized”, but what does this really mean? It means search engines can effortlessly read all of your website’s content and navigate throughout your site, backwards & forward, with no complex doorways or flashy animations to negotiate.
Three Keys for Good SEO: Content, Structure and Activity.
You’ll want to carefully choose headlines, page titles & content that contain keywords which are valuable for your business. Take advantage of Google’s Keyword Planner to gain a better understanding of what keywords may or may not offer potential for site traffic. Search engines are constantly crawling cyberspace, on the hunt for “rich content”, and they will assess your website’s authority based on the amount of content offered that match search criteria. Have an objective look at your content and ask yourself how much information you offer for each targeted keyword. Content really is king!
Content Forward Structure.
Base your content around your user experience first, instead of SEO keyword stuffing tactics. While keywords are important, you’ll want to evenly balance these with a good amount of information for each topic. Images, videos and landing pages with appropriately labeled headings, page tags and URLs are something you’ll also want to pay particular attention to. If you’re truly passionate about providing a healthy amount of info on your selected topic, all of the elements, along with the contents will appear natural and the Gods will reward you.
Backlink Values.
If you don’t know too much about how backlinks work, that’s probably a good thing. There are plenty of businesses that have experience being manually penalized (some vaporized) by search engines for ‘blog spamming’, ‘link-farming’ and other ‘black-hat” methods; tactics created for the sole purposes of manipulating a search engine result. Once upon a time, major search engines would evaluate your site’s worth, largely on the sheer number and weight of inbound backlinks it was associated with. Fast forward to today, and while some consideration is given to this element, back-linking on its own does little to positively impact your website’s ranking, and as in many cases, too much has the opposite effect, kills your traffic and perhaps your business along with it.
Be cautious of SEO companies that offer you a quick fix. These companies cannot be held liable for any irreversible damage they cause and they can cause plenty in a relatively short period of time. If it’s too good to be true… well, you know the rest.
Social Media Engagement.
Inbound links are great for your ranking and profile if they are naturally created, such as writing blogs, articles, press releases, etc. All social activity and social media discussions are also a huge plus. Give consideration to submitting your website’s URL to business directories, but ensure that these directories have a good PageRank.
If you’ve tried everything you can possibly think of and still can’t make it work, either look into Google AdWords or ask an SEO company for advice. SEO services are not necessarily a fit for every business but a good online marketing plan is.