SEO, or, search engine optimization, is an important strategy to implement within your business. Having a good SEO in place will help you get a lot more organic searches through Google and in turn, rank on top of the search results.
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Why is SEO important for your business
In order for your business to gain success online, you need to attract quality traffic. You will also need a large quantity of web traffic to help your business. There are many places and ways to gain traffic that does not have to do with SEO, such as social media. But having your website ranked high on Google is the best way to find your audience and have them care for your business. When people use Google they look for someone to solve their problems. If your website solves their problem, you’d want to be at the top of the page.
The higher your rank on Google the better traffic your website will get and will result in potential money for your business. Being ranked high is being on the first page and ranking in the top 10. The higher you rank the more traffic you get, usually the top 3 get the highest traffic.
Let’s dive into some basic SEO you can implement or improve on your website right now to rank higher on Google
There are two kinds of SEO strategies, on-page SEO and off-page SEO. In this post, I will focus on on-page SEO.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is everything that is done on your website to rank high and be optimized for Google. The goal is to optimize your website to a level that when someone is looking for your kind of business you’d be ranked on the top.
SEO GUIDE 101
When I started learning about SEO I couldn’t wrap my head around the concept and thought it was way too technical for me, but I was completely wrong. SEO is not overly complicated, it’s time-consuming. SEO is also a strategy you need to keep in mind every time you do something on your website.
Think of it like this:
People look something up with their keywords -> they find your website cause the keywords matched -> you have a new visitor/customer. The beauty of proper SEO is that it brings in FREE traffic. Making small changes to your website right now, will, in the long run, give you a huge ROI.
KEYWORDS
The main way Google understands what you’re trying to communicate is through words, and, specifically, keywords. Keywords are the main words that represent your business and each page on your website. Google has a great tool called Google keyword planner that you can use to see which words are the right fit for who you’re trying to target. Each page on your website needs to have at least 1 targeted keyword.
Note: Do not throw in random keywords that are not related to your business or given page. having random keywords will not help direct your website in the right word search.
Aside from Google’s keywords search, you can also use SEMRush which is a more advanced tool for analyzing the right keywords to your content. Keywords are important because they are what people type in when they are looking for a solution to their problems. If you find the exact and best keywords for your business, you are golden.
TITLE TAGS
Title tags are important for Google because it uses title tags to understand what your page is about. If you’re going to make changes, start with the title tag. Make sure that your title consists of your keyword(s) and has under 55 characters.
META TAG DESCRIPTION
A meta tag is a description of what you see in your search engine under the title. This paragraph allows the reader to know what the post is about and be interested in learning more. When crafting your meta description, keep it within 150-200 characters and be sure to include your keyword(s).
Note: When the search is done and the keyword is found in the search, Google will bold the keyword if it is in the description. This will increase the number of web clicks.
INTERLINKING CONTENT
Link to your own content with relevant keywords. Wherever appropriate, link other pages of your website within the content. Let’s say you have a blog and a post about SEO and then you write another post about something related. Link the SEO post into the new post. This will allow the user to explore your content further and reduce the bounce rate by staying on your site longer.
QUANTITY WITH QUALITY
Review the content of each page and your blogs. If you find that the content has less than 1000 words you may want to increase the content. Google understands what your content is about better when there are more words, especially proper keywords. If you’re in the e-commerce business, this is less concerning to you. But make sure that in the product description there is a keyword(s).
ALT TEXT YOUR IMAGES
Google is not very visual and thus it does not read your image. In order to make sure Google understands your image, you have to use keywords in the alt text description of your image.
Note: the way to do this will depend on your web platform.
Tip: Before you upload any images on your site make sure that you rename them to what they are exactly. This also helps Google’s awareness of your image.
PERMALINKS STRUCTURE
If your permalinks are not on point, you will need to update them. Your permalinks should look like this: https://creative-boost.net/blog/tools-to-start-your-own-business-onlineand not https://creative-boost.net/blog78/kkjuuhelpingyou787-sh.
Ensure that your link dashes to create the sentence for the link. You can also try using Mangools, as it is a very helpful tool that helps you maximize your SEO and add all the missing pieces.
HIGH-SPEED WEBSITE
This is very important. Your site speed is one of the key factors in determining where Google will place you. Google often penalizes slow websites as they are not fully optimized and will not keep visitors on the site. Therefore, you need to make sure your site is up to speed. You can check your site’s speed by using Google Pagespeed Insights. If your website is slow, you have to make some changes. Here are two tips that will help the process:
Compress your images Unless you need your images to weigh 15MB you should be compressing your site’s images. You can compress your images through photoshop, preview or you can use ting.png.com
Change your web-host Often a website speed is poor because the hosting is not able to handle the traffic and web content. I would recommend checking out SiteGround, their hosting is one of the best and most affordable in the game.
There you have it: a complete SEO to help rank first on Google. Some of these tips will be showing you immediate results and some will take some time because they are a long-term strategy. Either way, you are now more equipped to write in a way that helps your content be seen.