As a marketer, you know that you want to reap the best benefits out of search engine optimization (SEO). Basically everyone in the marketing world is crazy about SEO. Even if you have not jumped on the bandwagon yet, you know that sooner or later you would have to do it.
The problem is that as a first time SEO practitioner, it is difficult to know where to start. There are so many things to look into just to try to get the basics right. Brand new words like keyword densities, backlinks, offsite, onsite, link neighborhood, meta title, meta description, H1, H2, etc are just going to drive you crazy.
To make things worse, your boss would likely be breathing down your neck, believing that all marketers are naturally SEO specialists and hiring you means that you will bring miracles to the organic traffic numbers to the company website.
Want to know how to start working on SEO?
Here’s how:
Target People Who Are Looking for You
As a newbie in the SEO world, you might not be able to rank well for a super popular keyword. However there are lots of opportunities for specific keywords.
First things first, you will need to at least ensure that you are searchable if your audience is looking for you, your company, or your product – which is a very specific and unique set of keywords.
Before looking on building generic keywords, make sure that your company's website is listed high when you type in your brand or product keywords.
Do Basic Keywords Research
SEO specialists usually charge a high price for helping you to choose and analyze the perfect keywords. It is justifiable knowing that they are able to give you the exact number of average monthly searches for each search engine that you wish to target.
However if you are short of cash and you need a quick fix, there is another method that could potentially help you out.
So, here’s what you do. If you have a topic that you think people might type in to search for you, key it into Google and see what results are shown.
If you see that other websites are all using the words that you have used in the search term, most likely these keywords will be very tough for you to work on.
However if you see that other websites are not using those keywords in the search results page, that means that they are not targeting those keywords and you might have found the next low-hanging fruit to garner potential new traffic. For such cases, the chances for you to start ranking after a few simple tweaks to your website will be high.
Optimize your Meta Title and Meta Description
What is Meta Title and Description?
They are the key information that is shown on the search engine results page (SERP). In Google SERP, the words in blue is the Meta Title and the words in grey is the Meta Description.
The easiest way to start is to include at least one keyword and a few descriptive phrases to tell the searcher what your webpage is all about.
Optimize Your File Names
Search engines are definitely able to look beyond the texts of your site. They are also monitoring the file names of your webpages, images and other media files.
The best way to optimize them is to identify a theme or focus on each particular page. For instance, if you have an image to showcase your company logo, you might want to include your company name in the file name instead of just using a generic title like “logo.jpg”.
Make sure your file names are short and relevant at the same time. If you need to separate the words, using hyphens will be better than using other separators like underscore or spaces.
Optimize Your Content
Now that you’ve chosen a proper Meta Title, Meta Description and file name, add the same words throughout the content of the page.
Although you know that you want to include enough keywords to capture Google’s attention, don’t go crazy by repeating the same keywords literally across the whole page. At the end of the day, your users need to read real content and you need to keep them as long as you can.
Good locations to add keywords will usually be headlines and sub-headers, and you can sprinkle a few more relevant words around the rest of your copy.
Conclusion
Is there more to SEO than just this 5 tips?
Yes, definitely a lot more.
There are lots of books, classes and online resources available on SEO. Besides understanding the theories, there are many different strategies that you can adopt to improve your website traffic. If you are interested to explore SEO, you will need to cater time and money into this.
If you are just getting started, these 5 tips will be good enough to keep you busy for quite some time. Set aside about 10 mins for each page to optimize the content of your site and gradually monitor the organic traffic performance from there.
SEO alone will not bring you tons of new business opportunities. Eventually, you will need to combine with other marketing strategies to bring in new business. However at the very least, your website should at least be searchable if users are looking specifically for you online.
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