Lately, I have been talking about why your business needs to be online and creating a website that effectively sells. Now I want to talk about using SEO techniques in order to get your website higher rankings on Google, so that more natural traffic can be generated for your website.
I am a blogger and content writer but I admit that SEO is a tricky process to understand because you don't control the formula which designates the ranking assigned to your website. For your part, you just study online advice and guidelines and hope that the strategy you are using produces the results you desire. And one key thing to understand; SEO is not an overnight process that brings results instantly. You will have to work hard and put together an effective strategy in order to develop a system of actions that help boost your website's ranking.
So how do you implement a successful SEO strategy that produces great results? Let me give you 3 foundation tips that should help:
1. Keyword Optimization
Keyword optimization is one of the most important criteria in your SEO strategy. When people do a Google search, they are typing in keywords in hopes of bringing up specific results. Therefore, you want your website to have the right keywords that bring you the right visitors. When you target the wrong keywords you end up with the wrong visitors. This negatively affects your website metrics because people leave quickly after not finding what they are searching for. In turn, this gives Google negative data signals which effects your websites overall presence.
This is something I admit I need to work on myself. When I first started my blog, I just put in various keywords related to a particular blog post, instead of having a focused set of keywords. Therefore, each blog post has a range of different keywords that do not organically fit with the next post in order to strengthen my rankings with Google. And because of this Google has no way to attach certain keywords to my blog. Therefore, my ability to be identified for a specific keyword category is negated.
2. Create Relevant Content
When you hear people say that content is king, it is a very true statement. Great content is content that gets people talking; wanting to leave comments or share your information with others. This is a signal to Google that the content on your website has quality value.
But don't be fooled. Great content has to have an effective strategy behind it in order for it to properly work. Great content does not promote itself. You have to do the work to actually make your content relevant. Have an active social media account, where people interact with you and share what you share. Look at what's trending and partner with other blogs and websites so you all can share each other's content to your respective audiences. Don't just expect for people to find you. Make them aware of your content so that they can become interested in what you are saying and want to stay connected to your content.
3. Have Quality Links
Link building is a product of great content. When you produce quality content, you are able to attract sites which want to link to your content. But you have to be sure that those sites linking to your website are good sites with quality content. Because a bad link to your website can negatively affect your site's ranking, this can be looked at as penalization by association.
One way I build up my quality links is by guest blogging on authoritative sites. Having my own blog, being a blog contributor on Huffington Post and guest writing for other sites help to build my own online authority. I have a link to my blog on these various sites which helps with my SEO linking strategy. But it is not the magic button that leads to a rush of traffic. This still takes some time, a lot of writing and a lot of guest appearances in order to build up the links that help enhance the other SEO techniques being performed.
SEO is a tricky equation to solve. These 3 tips will help you starting off but read up on some detailed information about SEO link building. You must stay informed about what actually works towards enhancing your website's SEO rankings so that it can gain the attention of Google's algorithm. This is something I wish I took more serious when I first started my blog.