Search engine optimization (SEO) is the key to getting more organic search traffic to your website. It can be bewildering, to say the least, but it’s worth learning a little SEO so you can boost traffic to your website yourself and save some money on marketing costs.
You don’t have to be an expert to improve your website’s SEO. Anyone can take these five simple steps to search rankings better. Even if you do some of them, you’ll still benefit enormously. Here’s what you need to do.
1) Publish Good Content Regularly
Publishing good content regularly so that fresh, unique content is always being published on your site is one of the most important things you can do to keep your website high in search rankings. These days, search engines like Google reward websites with valuable, high-quality content. The better your content, the more optimized your website.
Your content should offer readers something they want. It should be entertaining or informative. A blog is a good way to add content to your website regularly. Each blog post presents a chance to use a new keyword relevant to your industry. You can post product reviews, instructional videos, how-to posts, weekly advice columns, experience pieces, or whatever you want, as long as it’s authoritative and relevant to your industry or products while creating value for your user.
2) Use the Right Keywords
Keyword research is truly at the core of any viable SEO strategy. Ideally, you want to choose keywords that get a lot of search traffic but don’t have a lot of competition. These words will bring you the most traffic because lots of people are searching for them, but they’re not finding much. That means you’ll have more of an opportunity even to get seen in search results because you won’t be competing with the big brands that take up most of the bandwidth for high-competition search terms.
If you run a local business, make sure you’re using local keywords. For example, an SEO marketing agency in Phoenix should use search terms like “Phoenix SEO agency” to bring in that local traffic. While far fewer people will be searching that localized term, those who do will be more likely to complete a transaction with one of the businesses they find.
3) Add Meta Tags to Your Pages
Adding meta tags to your content may be one of those SEO tasks that you decide to hire a professional for. However, if you’re willing to get under the hood, so to speak, and make adjustments to your website’s HTML code, tweaking your title tags, header tags, and meta description can make it easier for your desired users to find you in search. Title metadata is the most important for SEO, and meta descriptions are probably the second most important. Learn how to write a meta description before inserting one in your website HTML.
4) Build Backlinks
Building backlinks can be the most challenging part of SEO because it depends on other webmasters finding your site to be authoritative and useful and sharing links to it on social media or linking to it from their own sites. You shouldn’t buy backlinks; they often aren’t high-quality enough to affect your SEO anyway. You should create content worth sharing and linking to and then stir up some buzz about your brand online so that more people will want to share and link to your content.
5) Follow SEO News
Change is the only constant in life, which goes double for SEO best practices. Search engines are constantly amending their algorithms to incentivize high-quality content. You should follow a good SEO blog to stay up-to-date on best practices, and you’ll know when big chances to search algorithms are coming so you can prepare. If you don’t keep up with SEO news, you risk being taken by surprise when algorithm changes are released. Generally, as long as your SEO practices are above board and you anticipate big algorithm changes. They might mean that you can avoid taking huge hits to your rankings when algorithm changes occur.
You don’t have to become an expert to improve your website’s SEO. By adding content regularly and using the right keywords, you can do a lot to boost your website’s search rankings and bring in the additional search traffic you need.
