Over the past few years, every small business or digital marketer has been taking advantage of search engine optimization (SEO) to boost their web pages in the search engine results. Statistics have even shown that search engine results are responsible for the majority of the online experiences of most internet users. So, if you are not utilizing the SEO method in the right way, you are doing your business lots of disservice.
Given this, how can you use the SEO method to get more traffic to your site?
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Understand What SEO Is
SEO refers to the whole process involved in ensuring that your site can be seen in search engine results pages (SERPs). Although there are lots of search engines, Google accounts for over 70% of all global search traffics. Therefore, most online marketers focus on ranking websites based on the criteria of Google.
According to some findings, Google will crawl different pages of your site to locate certain important signals. When those signals are found on any page, such a page will be ranked high on search engine results. Therefore, you need to understand SEO and create an SEO method that can get more traffic to your website.
Have A Proven Keyword Strategy
A keyword is a word or phrase that your customers will type when looking for your service or product. For instance, if a homeowner has a plumbing problem in New York City, such a person will likely go to Google and type something like “Plumbing service”, Plumber in New York City”, “Plumbing service in NYC”, etc. If you are a plumber in the city, these are some of the keywords you must use on your site.
You need to use a keyword strategy that enables you to get customers that only want to learn about your service or product as well as those that are ready to buy it. To get the keywords, you need to invest in keyword research. Various digital marketers specialize in this area; therefore, keyword research should not be a problem for you.
Generally, there are two types of keywords:
- Short-tail keywords – these are keywords that focus directly on your business. Using the example given above, “Plumbing service” is a short-tail keyword as it directly addresses your business.
- Long-tail keywords – these are questions, phrases, or words that may lead prospective customers to your site but they don’t focus on your business directly. In the example above, the homeowner may search “tips to fix plumbing fixtures” on Google. Although such a person doesn’t search for your service directly, your business may be able to take care of their needs.
Overall, your site must contain both short-tail and long-tail keywords in some strategic places that will be mentioned below.
Optimize Your Website With The Keywords
Knowing the essence of keywords is not enough; you must also understand where you have to keep those keywords in your website if you want to get more traffic. Based on experience, putting your keywords in the following parts of your site will produce great results.
- Title tags – the title tag is the text that shows in the search result. It describes what your page is all about. It can also be seen in the tab of your webpage. For title tags, you should only use your main keywords as they are the most essential.
- Header tags – these are the headlines that are utilized on your webpage. Notably, you are expected to format them with the H1-H6. However, when it comes to Google’s ranking, H1 and H2 are the crucial headers. Ensure your headlines are properly optimized with the keywords and formatted with the header tags.
- Page copy – this requires the use of keywords on different pages of your site, such as homepage, about us page, service page, etc. Nonetheless, you need to avoid overusing these keywords on any page of your website.
- Images – since Google image search can also be used in many cases by internet users, it is equally essential for you to add keywords to your images. Make sure that each image on your site has an image “title” tag and “alt text” tag. While the “alt text’ tag describes what the picture is about if it doesn’t load, the “title tag” is just a short description of the picture. Both must have keywords that are relevant to your service or product.
- Meta descriptions – this refers to the short text that shows below a clickable link that you get when you search for anything online. The meta description must have keywords and also give a snippet of what the page is about.
- URL structure – you can also add keywords to the URL of your website. However, this may not be possible if you already have a site.
Increase The Publication Of Quality, Keyword-filled Content
If you publish your blog posts or other content on your site about 2 to 4 times every week, your leads and conversions will increase. Therefore, it is an unwritten rule that you must publish content on your site regularly if you want to get more traffic to your site.
You should not only pay attention to the frequency of publication of articles, blog posts, and other content, but you must also consider the importance of quality. Your content must have exceptional information that your audiences will be willing to read. If readers stay longer on your site because of reading certain content, the Google algorithm will view your site as being important to the audience. Hence, your website will be pushed higher in the search result. This will make you get more traffic to your site.
While writing high-quality content for your website, don’t forget the keywords. Also, avoid keyword stuffing, which is the excessive use of keywords on a page.
Don’t Limit Your Content To Only Text
When talking about web content, most individuals usually focus on text such as blog posts, articles, and so on. However, there are lots more that can assist you to drive more traffic to your website. Videos, for instance, are quite vital to web pages. This is because most internet users now have a shorter attention span; hence, many of them will do anything possible to avoid reading long text on your site. With the help of videos, you can draw many individuals to your site.
In general, other contents that you should add to your website to get more traffic include:
- Images
- Infographics
- Voice content
- Video content
Don’t forget to optimize the titles of the content with the right keywords that can make it easy for people to find them.
Guest Post On Other Sites
Your SEO method doesn’t have to be limited to your website. You can guest post on other sites and then link the post to your website. This is often referred to as a backlink. By doing this, you can increase the traffic on your site significantly.
Nevertheless, you have to be wise with your choice of guest posting. You should only guest post on a website that is credible and has a sizeable amount of traffic. It is advisable that you post on a site that has more traffic than your site. Also, you must make sure that the content is relevant to your website as this will allow you to link it to your site naturally and easily.
Conclusively, there is no one-size-fits-all SEO method for every business. However, you should not shy away from trying the strategy listed above. Explore and experiment with different legitimate SEO methods until you get it right.
If you are interested in even more technology-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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