SEO is the fine art of crafting your website in a way that convinces search engines your content deserves to be placed at the top of their rankings. In other words, if you want to rank well in search engines and run a successful online business, you need SEO!
How do you do this? Well, there are several techniques you can employ, and different factors to take into account. The important thing to remember is that you must follow Google guidelines otherwise you can be penalised by being removed from the search engine index until you fix the fault. Websites that rank well:
- Are deemed more authoritative
- Are regarded as trustworthy
- Have a higher click-through rate
What SEO Techniques Should I Use?
Search engines send out spiders, or crawlers, to assess websites for content, quality of content and how well maintained a website is. There are also certain SEO web design techniques and plugins spiders look for to ensure your website provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience. Your website therefore has to be user-friendly and SEO friendly.
Know Your Keywords
Search term relevancy is vitally important for your website to be offered by search engines. If Google et al do not know what subject your website is about they do not know where to file it and it will therefore never be pulled in a search. You therefore need to label your website with relevant keywords.
Keywords are how Google predicts what the end-user is searching for based on the search terms they type into the search engine. You can therefore have any number of keywords that are specific to your website. You can find the most relevant keywords for your site by
Be Original
Back in the old SEO days, to get your content noticed, people could simply buy an automated service to copy and paste your blog posts onto a vast amount of sites, thus ensuring mass readership.
Nowadays, Google (quite rightly) considers this spam, and does not tolerate this type of “black hat” behaviour. Any content that has been copied or plagiaried will mean you are penalised and your website will be downgraded.
Quality Content
Quality content is one of the most important factors of your website – both in the eyes of search engines and the reader. Firstly, the content you post must be relevant to your product or service, informative and enjoyable to read. If your content doesn´t meet this criteria, search engines will not consider you trustworthy and readers will not consider you authoritative. As a result your click through rate will suffer.
Keep It Social
Google highly regards popular content, so getting people to link to your article is hugely important. To do this you need to be active on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The latter can be expected to be particularly influential with Google. Your social media strategy should include sharing content, making offers, engaging your followers in fun activities and casually chatting to understand your customers.
There is a lot more to SEO, but as a starting point focus on these four key factors and you will get your online business off to a good start. If you’re looking for a more comprehensive SEO strategy, why not get in contact to discuss your options.
