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Update Your Site With New and Improved SEO
Many sites on the web are not properly optimized for search engines. Over the last few years, search engine optimization (SEO) has expanded to the next level. In order for your business to keep ahead of online competition, your website needs more than just a great design and easy-to-use navigation. It needs improved SEO and relevant keywords, which will increase traffic to your site and bring web success.
Turn Your Website On
If you have a new site or revamping an old one, it’s best to start with on-site SEO. The reason for this is that you want your site to be as strong as possible so that when you begin off-site marketing, interested surfers will stay on your site longer because of your well-formed content and search engine result page (SERP) ranking.
One of the more important factors in SEO is making sure that your keywords and titles in the programming code match your content. Talk to your programmer about embedding and optimizing keyword tags for all pages on your website and blog. This allows search engine bots to properly crawl your site and rank it based on your keywords and tags. If the content does not match the meta tags, then your SERPs will drop. Therefore, consistency is vital for driving traffic to your site.
Since a lot of SEO work is technical, hiring a professional to optimize your site may be the way to go. What you can do on your own is write content and develop relevant keywords.
Winning the Keyword Game
Imagine for a moment that you know nothing about your business. What words would you then use to find your own website? Because you are an expert in your field, you might lose track of how the average person who doesn’t know your field would search for your content, products and services. It may be helpful for you to ask someone else how they would search for your business. I mention this because some of the most successful people in business got there because of simplicity.
Your keywords should reflect what you do in the simplest way possible. This does not mean ignore specifics, but rather keep them simple. For example, if you are a motivational speaker, think about what sets you apart from the other ones. Let’s say you speak about success. Your keywords could be success speaker, successful business strategies, leadership speaker, leaders and business, etc. Each keyword represents either who you are or what you do or help others to do.
Finding a Balance
Now that we’ve established how important SEO is for a successful business online, the next step is to optimize your site. Once you’ve chosen several keywords, integrate them into your copy (preferably within the first 250 words). Treat each page as if it were separate from the whole. Don’t be afraid to repeat keywords from page to page. Use them in article and page titles, tags, title tags, headers, links and webpage files. For images and URLs, use alt tags. Google crawls these for your rankings; therefore, you want to make sure that all images and links, including anchor links, have an alt tag, preferably with one or two keywords.
Be selective on how many keywords you use per page. One of the biggest problems with on-site SEO is over-optimization. This means that you need to find a proper balance, not abundance. A good rule of thumb is three or four keywords per page. I’ve used about four in this article alone, did you notice?
Remember that proper SEO can help drive traffic to your site. But SEO also requires content. Each page on your site should have interesting and newsworthy content that is optimized. If you only have ad copy, chances are visitors will quickly leave your site. This means that frequently updating your content and keywords will help maintain visitors and keep your site successful.
