In today’s internet world, for your website to get noticed in the vast sea of competition, you need to utilize SEO. Search engine optimization – or SEO – is one of the most important digital marketing strategies you will need to understand and use. The importance of it will not be all that obvious to those web entrepreneurs who do not make use of SEO. The bottom line is that without SEO, your website will be virtually invisible and as a result, search engines will not see it, crawl it, index it or share it in searches made by other internet users.
So, what kind of tricks can you do yourself to get an edge over your key competitors? You don’t need to know much about computers or website design to use the following SEO tricks on your website. But you do have to use SEO to benefit from search engine activity.
1 – Determine What Your Target Keywords Are
One of the most important steps to take to properly utilize SEO is to find out what your target keywords are. These keywords will play a huge role in the way your website content is presented. These keywords also have to relate to your business. For example, if you are selling furniture, your keywords have to make sense in the furniture realm. You can also use the keywords of the furniture businesses that compete against you for business. To figure out the best keywords to use, you can make use of several different online keyword tools.
2 – Clean Up Those Meta Descriptions and Page Titles
With your keywords, the first thing you can do is rewrite the meta descriptions of each page on your website to include these words. A meta description is a short description you see in search engine results under a website page that has been listed. The page titles are also an easy fix and if you use the keywords in your page titles, it makes your pages easier for search engines to find. You can find examples online on how to write effective meta descriptions and page titles. Also, be sure to incorporate those important keywords in the URL of each of your website pages.
3 – Make Use of Internal And Outbound Links
Linking is when you send traffic from one of your pages to a page of a different website (outbound) or a different page on your website (internal). Both of these types of links will improve your SEO considerably. However, when you use outbound links try to link to pages of a website that has some level of authority. The websites you link to will have search engine rankings. The better the ranking, the more it helps your website improve its ranking. Linking to a poorly ranked website will, unfortunately, negatively impact your website ranking.
4 – Use PPC Marketing To Improve Exposure
One of the most cost-effective ways to get traffic to your website is through pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. Yes, it will cost you a few bucks but you only pay for those who will click through to your page. Depending on how you use PPC – to send website users to a specific page, to advertise a product or to gather information on the visitors to your website – how your PPC campaign is written and executed will have a huge impact on the success. Regardless, PPC is a vital piece of the SEO puzzle to improve your website exposure and rankings.
5 – Share Your Insight With A Blog
You may not be the best writer online, but one of the most interesting ways to build a loyal following for your business, service or product is through a blog. Blogs are much more than just random ramblings as search engines eat up the content – provided you post something on the blog regularly. You can attract search engines by producing high-quality content but be sure to avoid duplicating content. Plus, if you have two websites on the same niche, don’t even think about posting the same blog on each. You’ll just earn both websites penalties resulting from search engines.
BONUS TIP – Mobilize Your Website
Have you noticed that pretty much everyone these days has a mobile device of some kind? It can be a smartphone, tablet or even a laptop. Because so many people are relying on these smaller devices to do everything from communicating, shopping and looking for information, your website should be mobile optimized. Search engines are very fond of mobilized sites and if yours is, you stand a better chance of having your website show up in search results. A non-mobilized website will be penalized and will not gain the visibility of one that has been mobilized.
EXTRA BONUS TIP – Optimize Your Website Images
This is one of those SEO factors that many web entrepreneurs miss. When a search engine crawls one of your web pages, it sees the keywords and text along with the images. However, the images are blank spots on the web page that say nothing to the search engine. By adding alternative text to these images – and make use of your keywords – you end up telling the search engines what those images are and why they should be on the page being crawled. Alt text also helps your images appear in relevant online search results instead of being invisible.
In Conclusion
SEO is not rocket science. However, when you get down to it, there is a fair deal of science involved. When you use the right SEO tricks on your website, you ‘trick’ the search engines to spend more time giving your web pages the once over. You are also trying to pull traffic away from your competitors and in the world of business, those companies that market themselves effectively are the ones that tend to be the most successful. The tricks listed above are intended to give you a slight competitive edge with your online marketing program.
This article comes from Marina Turea, content manager at Digital Authority Partners.