Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important strategy that most business owners never truly master. Some may think they are doing it correctly but many are just wasting their time and money. In this post, we will reveal a few essential SEO best practices to help your website gain more visibility in the search engines and more organic traffic on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
So without further ado, let’s dive right in!
1.) Make Sure Proper On-Site SEO is In Place
The starting point to any successful Search Engine Optimization campaign is to make sure that you are properly optimizing your metatags and content with target keyword phrases. The SEO tags you should focus on to start are Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, Header Tags and Image ALT Tags. Think of these like the skeleton of your website. They build the foundation that really holds everything together. These tags should contain relevant keywords based on your business, industry, competitors etc, that you’d like to rank for.
Just like your SEO tags, you should also ensure that your content is optimized as well. This means having enough copy per blog post and/or webpage and your target keywords sprinkled in there as well. You will also want to add a handful of internal links pointing to other pages of your website. This helps pass some link juice from page to page and also allows users to navigate your site more efficiently.
Once your on-site SEO is in good standing, you are a real SEO beginner.
2.) Building Quality Backlinks to Strengthen Off-Site SEO
Building natural and quality backlinks to your website will really help take your SEO campaign to another level. It is in this phase where search engine rankings and organic traffic really start to increase. Once you gain momentum here, things can really start to ramp up for you and your business.
A simple link building technique that you can get started with right away is guest posting. This means researching relevant sites in your niche and asking them if they are accepting guest posts. If you get the green light to proceed, you would simply write your article (based on their guidelines), and strategically place a link or two pointing back to your website. This is a classic example of building a quality link that Google loves. In fact, they favor websites that take this strategic approach, since it takes time and work to implement. Now the idea here is to build as many quality links as you can…and let me emphasize one more time the word quality. For example, if you buy 1,000 links from Fiverr for $5, you run a great risk of getting your site penalized by Google. Do things the right way the first time and results will follow.
Conclusion:
To sum up, a thriving SEO campaign is a mix of a few things, keyword research/analysis, proper tag/content optimization, on-going link building and consistent content generation. If you craft a plan around these different tactics, you will put yourself ahead of 99% of the competition.
Lastly, remember that you need to have patience. SEO, unlike other forms of advertising like PPC, is an approach that takes time to see results (months and even years sometimes). Google will not recognize your site changes right away, so you need to maintain a realistic mindset when starting out. However, if you’re consistent with your approach, the results are well worth the wait!