The ABCs of SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s one of the most effective ways to help new users find your website. If you’re not sure what SEO entails, you should consider hiring an expert to optimize your website and help you develop strategies to continue to grow traffic and sales in the future. Here are some easy strategies that you can implement to help your website get found by people searching on Google and other search engines like Bing and Yahoo!

A - Always Rank For Relevant Keywords

Search engine optimization is more than just optimizing your website to get more traffic from search engines. As important as that is, you can use many other tactics and strategies to improve your results. For example, suppose you only optimize for keywords related to your industry and leave out words that consumers might also search for. In that case, you could be missing out on a huge opportunity to reach new customers. A good SEO strategy starts with choosing relevant keywords or phrases and expanding outward. Think about it like building an onion: You start with something close to you (e.g., best ice cream in Seattle) and then move outward by layering extra context (e.g., best ice cream around town). Using different variations of your keyword in content title tags and meta descriptions will help you show up for multiple keyword searches—even ones that people may not have considered yet. Also, include keywords in-text links whenever possible. Many companies overlook using links when trying to boost their SEO rankings, but they are one of the most effective ways! Finally, focusing on long-tail keywords (keywords used less frequently) makes sense because fewer people search for them, but those who do tend to convert at a higher rate. As a bonus, it’s easier to rank high in searches when competing against less competition.

B - Build your site's infrastructure

Web development can be a daunting undertaking, from content creation to media file management for those without experience. To make things easier, don’t reinvent the wheel! Use templates, pre-built components, and off-the-shelf modules to get your website running quickly. It’s better to have a simple site up sooner rather than later so you can focus on more important elements like marketing and improving your user experience (UE). If you’re interested in learning how to build websites from scratch, check out our guide.

Now that we’ve got your site running smoothly from a technical standpoint, it’s time to optimize its various aspects for search engines. The best way to do that is with structured data markup language: schema tags which allow search engines—and other devices or applications—to interpret content on your page as lists, images, ratings, or reviews. As well as encouraging better indexing by search engines, having appropriate schema tags means people using digital assistants like Siri or Google Now will also have an easier time accessing information about what they’re looking at. Meaning higher potential organic traffic by making sure everything is optimized properly.

C - Create User-Friendly URLs

One thing that search engines look at is whether a URL is user-friendly or not. If your URLs are long and difficult to understand, you could be missing out on search engine traffic. Try using words in your URLs that describe what’s on that page, and you can increase clicks and get more search engine traffic. You can optimize SEO for your content without having to change anything else about it drastically. Just tweak some simple parts like your title tags, meta descriptions, etc., and make changes to what you’ve already written to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Even if your website doesn’t have many visitors right now, there are tons of strategies you can use today to help with any site traffic.

Over time your ranking will improve, bringing even more readers to each post than ever before! Improve Your Website Rankings With Meta Descriptions: One way you can optimize SEO for every single post is by making sure its meta description tag makes sense in relation to each specific page. Just write an intriguing summary sentence or two about how readers will benefit from clicking through based on whatever topic it covers. On top of helping with SERP rankings, optimized metadata also gives people reason enough to actually click through since they’ll want to learn more now that they know what they’ll find.

D - Make Site Indexable by Search Engines

Your site can get crawled and indexed by search engines like Google and Bing if it follows a few best practices. You should set up a sitemap, title your pages using keywords, include an XML Sitemap, link to your internal pages from your homepage, use h1 tags for headers on each page and provide alt tags for all images. If you do these things when building your site, it will be easier for search engines to find your pages and build their index. Once that’s done, you can optimize each page to rank better in search results by making sure they contain lots of relevant text, good keyword density (not too many or too few), are visually appealing, and have good quality links pointing back to them. This is known as On-Page SEO, which essentially optimizes every page of your website individually. To learn more about On-Page SEO, I recommend reading through Google’s Webmaster Guidelines here. Another great tool to help with creating easy-to-read content that is readable by both humans and robots alike is Copyscape – here, you can enter a URL into their system and see just how much text has been plagiarized on any given webpage. Whether it’s because of incomplete citations, copying large portions of content, or even including another author’s entire work without giving proper credit. Copyscape helps make sure none of those elements appear anywhere in your own content, so you avoid getting penalized by search engines!

E - Eliminate Errors in Web Design

Website design plays a huge role in search rankings and search engine rankings, so it’s important to use HTML correctly. Incorrect usage can drastically affect your rankings, so you should go through your HTML and ensure you’re using all relevant elements correctly. If you’re unsure about what tags to use or if you can only optimize a certain amount with HTML alone, it’s time to consider a website redesign or re-platforming. Don’t take chances; don’t play with your SEO; just fix it and move on. Your website may be doing poorly in terms of search ranking is never an excuse for poor web design. By making sure your website loads quickly and is easy to navigate for users, you’ll enhance both visitor experience and SEO optimization. After all, who would want to remain on a confusing or disorganized website? Letting users feel comfortable while searching allows them to spend more time (and therefore more money) on your site—which translates into higher SEO ratings. Remember: great SEO equals higher conversion rates too!

Applying these steps will surely lead you to have an effective digital marketing strategy without getting lost along the way.