As a small business, your company website is one of your most effective marketing tools. Having a website optimized right generates a significant proportion of your sales leads, and it provides enough customer service information to take some pressure away from after-sales service. However, before it can do either of these things, people have to find it.
Pay per click advertising may drive traffic, but the traffic is expensive, so businesses should aim to rank high with organic search. With that said, the 6 SEO marketing tips mentioned below will steer you in the right direction for optimizing your site, enjoy!
1. Get Great Content
Great content is what draws people to your websites. As people find the great content, they’ll link to it from their own sites. These links are what help you rank high on search engines. Don’t be fooled by SEO folks who say they can do great things with keyword trickery. Keywords get you in the game, but the links to those keywords drive you up the rankings.
2. Optimize Every Part of Your Website
Search engines display image and video results for basic searches now, so it’s important to have all the elements of your website optimized with the correct alt tags, attributes, captions and all that fun stuff. It’s even important to make sure the images filenames have your keywords in them. Images and videos also help drive links to your website, so making sure they’re findable is a very important part of SEO.
3. Use Other Websites
Links from websites like YouTube and Wikipedia won’t help increase your ranking, but they do command a lot of traffic. Wikipedia ranks very highly on search engines, so a page on your subject which links to your website will drive a lot of traffic. Putting an interesting, but not too long, video on YouTube can provide a very productive pipeline for traffic to your website.
4. Avoid Black Hats
Blackhat SEO techniques are those that will lower your search engine rank. This includes putting links in link farms (sites with nothing but links) and stuffing a keyword onto a page as many times as you can. These techniques will lower the rank of your site and may even get you delisted. Be honest with your optimization and you’ll probably be fine, and make sure links to your website are in places you want to visit.
5. Use Internal Links
Internal links serve two functions. Firstly, you can use keywords in the anchor text of your internal links to show search engine crawlers which keywords are relevant. This shows the search engine’s robots your content is relevant for a particular keyword. Secondly, internal links help these robots find their way around your website and index every page. If a robot can’t find a page, it doesn’t matter how much time you spent on the keywords and links, it still won’t get indexed.
6. Don’t Change Your Domain Name
One factor used by search engines is the age of a domain. The longer you hold onto a domain name, the better off you’ll be. There was also talk of Google having a “sandbox,” where websites waited for a while after they were first published and before Google would rank them correctly. While there isn’t much you as a website owner can do, you should buy your domain names early, and keep the same domain name for as long as possible. You can change the design and branding of the website as you need to, but don’t change the domain name unless you absolutely have to.
Whatever you try to get your site ranked higher, remember to focus on the two most basic elements of SEO – great content and internal structure. With these two things, search engines will have an easy time indexing your great content, and other web users will want to link to it. Use these basic tricks and avoid any spammy tactics, and your site will slowly but surely move up the search engine rankings.
Bonus: Content Marketing Strategy
A consistent content marketing strategy is the best approach to differentiate your company as a trusted adviser and leader within its industry. One question every business owner asks themselves before developing any content marketing strategy is “What sort of content should I include in my content marketing campaign?” Implementing and publishing the perfect kind of content will always lead to an increase your website’s online visibility and ultimately, increase your company’s sales revenue.
It’s no secret that certain kinds of content yield more web traffic and customers than other kinds of content. That being said, educational content builds customer trust and often makes readers consider your company as an industry leader. Furthermore, educational content stirs interest and creates buying criteria. The result of publishing educational content is receiving and noticing a significant amount of brand loyalty towards your company and increasing your chances of retaining first-time customers and converting them into returning customers.
Once a business owner decides to publish educational content as a part of their content marketing campaign, they must also identify their customers’ most frequent needs and questions. Prospective customers have different needs and questions in mind throughout their shopping life cycle.
A big challenge that business owners often face is identifying their customers’ most common needs and questions. It’s a great idea for every business owner to map out the questions or needs they hear from their customers most frequently. Once a business owner tackles and addresses each need or question in their content, their website visitors will feel reassured to the point where they’ll believe that the owner’s service or product is reliable, as well as superior among its competitors’ similar products or services.
For a free consultation on how to establish an effective website, contact the WordPress website design and development team at WebDesignValley.com today!
