Search engine optimization is a complex and difficult-to-master practice, but it's essential to a business owner's success on the web. Whether you're running an eCommerce store or a brick-and-mortar company, you need to understand how search engines work in order to correctly identify and address weaknesses in your website's SEO. For six key tips on how you can increase your website visibility by off-page SEO, see this article.
Keywords are the cornerstone of SEO. Without knowing what keywords your audience is using, you can’t hope to be found by them. This is why keyword research is so crucial. In fact, before you even start writing your content, you’ll want to do keyword research so you know what terms you should be using. Here are a few reasons your keyword research will be so helpful:
Many people get confused about keyword research and find themselves crawling through this site in search of something that might actually have nothing to do with SEO! They end up leaving with no SEO content and a frustrating search index.
Google will only show you a handful of terms that could potentially rank for your topic, so you should take the time to find out what is already mentioned much better than other people will. To do keyword research, you’ll want to head over to the entire Google Search Engine Ranking Factors page, which includes more than 50 different technical terms and phrases.
Taking time to research your keywords is definitely a form of on-page SEO, but it will work faster than trying to figure out what keywords to use at the start of the craft. Luckily, search engines save all of these phrases and phrases in what they call a “matrix” for you to peruse.
At the top, you can identify by keyword what other pages are already ranking for, and by extension, these rankings for all of your pages. From the engine’s perspective, these are all ‘keyword phrases’, meaning you may be able to target these rankings with your new content. Check out the SEO section of the Google Search Engine Ranking Matrix for complete details of keywords and other page-level SEO concepts.
Depending on what topic you want to write about, you will likely need to use at least one keyword for your article. Depending on the topic of your article, keyword research may be very general or too specific.
2. Link Building
The best way to get better rankings on search engines is through link building. Backlinks are the way to get your website found by search engines. The more backlinks you have pointing to your website, the more likely you are to get discovered and ranked by search engines. The more highly ranked you are on search engines, the more traffic you will get.
These are the most heavily used keywords in search engines as they are the most valuable for a business to rank high on. Keywords are the text in your content that tells Google what your site is all about and exactly what type of content it is. Check out the list below for 20 best keywords and their corresponding search volumes for different search engines:
Search volume is one of the major metrics used to tell search engines how useful your content is. It’s a rough estimate of how often a keyword or topic is being searched. To calculate your search volume, simply plug the keyword into the very end of your content, like this:
This tells Google how many times a day people are typing “how to start a successful online business”. Below is an example of a keyword with search volume of 2300.
“How to start a successful online business” 2300 searches per month
Due to the explosion of online businesses, there is a high demand for information on the “how-to” of content marketing. This demand for information reaches no end. As a result, search engine users are inundated with content on how to write and rank for a broken algorithm that devalues most of what you produce. This means that keywords are a must when creating headlines, titles, descriptions, keywords, links, and titles for your content.
USP stands for Unique Selling Point which describes the unique reason that your customers should choose your service or product. Unique Selling Point is why people should spend money on your product or service.
3. Social Media
Social media is a great way to connect with your followers and customers. It’s also a great way to learn what your followers like and don’t like about your brand, and also what they like and don’t like about your competitors.
There are dozens of social media platforms out there and I wouldn’t suggest building a brand on just any one of them; rather, focus on an area that’s related to your niche and your goals. Additionally, these platforms make it so easy to share your content to a growing audience, so this tip has a lot of potentials.
With the decrease in popularity of social media being social media, the importance of social media as a marketing tool is more critical than ever. Whether you’re starting out or already have a large audience, it’s essential that you continue to create engaging content that engages your audience. While the importance of creating a social media presence is self-evident, it’s still important to learn the best social media platform for your unique circumstances. For six tips on which social media platforms are best for business owners, see this article.
Content creation is at the heart of good digital marketing, and social media in particular. Whether you want to provide free content for your audience, sell your product, or sell referral services, you need to be consistently creating content through any medium you use. Whether that be on your website, on a social media or blogging platform, or even blogging on a website you own. This means uploading content consistently and being consistent about posting high-quality content, no matter what platform you use.
Luckily, because social media is such a massive marketing platform, content creators can leverage platforms like Strava, Buffer, Facebook, and LinkedIn to track their social media performance, as well as integrate their digital marketing strategy into their existing business plan. For six key ideas on how to create engaging, valuable social media content for your audience, see this article.
4. Content Creation
The quickest way to build trust with an audience is to create content that they can relate to and which they find valuable. If you have a blog, post regularly. If you have a YouTube channel, create a new video every week. If you have social media channels, post new content there as well.
The easier it is for visitors to find information on your sites, the better. Crawl-level and page-level SEO are two different skills that need to be developed. First, identify the most important pages on your site. Then create a few page-specific pages to bring together content from the other pages. For example, if there is an email sign-up page, create another page that sells discounts on different email services. Finally, re-organize pages and organize them based on your main topic or business. If you have information or events on your site, prioritize adding pages that cover specific topics.
Of course, you have many options when it comes to driving traffic to your sites. The key is to create a strategy to better separate the wheat from the chaff. Start with taking the best content from your site and organizing it according to its canonical URL. Then take that site’s content and repurpose it for another page on your site. Lastly, when you create a new page on your site, make sure that it is well-situated with respect to the other pages of your site and other pages on the web.
Another important aspect of SEO that requires attention is the placement of images and videos. These images and video files must be optimized for both page layout and SEO. When visiting a page that contains these files, stakeholders will most likely expect a certain format when they arrive at your site. Optimizing images and videos require some creativity when it comes to your image stacking or positioning. Try experimenting with scrapers to find categories of images and compare them to images on your site to see what changes your image SEO performance.
Mobile is no longer a “nice to have,” it’s a necessity. If you are not optimizing your website for mobile devices, you’re losing out on a huge chunk of your traffic.
While most developers will have you use responsive images to create consistent images for all types of devices, responsive web design is a paradigm shift in how we load webpages into the vast software infrastructure. Not only does responsive design help your users feel more comfortable on different size and screen resolutions, but it also allows search engines and Google to deliver insightful results for users searching on mobile devices. Customers on screens smaller than 768px are disadvantaged when it comes to optimizing titles and descriptions of individual qualities and quantities, leading to significantly lower rankings than comparable desktop results. According to Google’s 2015 State of the Web.
To help you understand how to optimize your site for mobile devices, I recommend you take a deep dive into how search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! work. The best way to learn more is to download a free SEO Starter Guide included in the SEO Starter Kit™ that guides you through creating a modern responsive website that delivers a great user experience across all web browsers. Along the way, you’ll learn about Google’s Image Optimization API, how to debug image issues to get a more detailed analysis of your site’s search engine stack, how to measure site speed, and how to develop great internationalization strategies to make your customers’ and customers’ countries or cities searchable.
The Flexible Dropdown Module is a powerful way to instantly and easily transition between a business type and a page structure. The module works both on mobile and on desktop. Plus, it has a custom JavaScript code editor based on the Visual Website builder.
In six easy steps, this plugin enables you to transform your content into a flexible dropdown that contains links to your product parts.
