Search Engine Optimization: 7 Tips You Can Implement Today

 

By: Matt Bacak

In 2010, there were 255 million websites worldwide. While not all of these websites are informative or entertaining, the sheer volume can make your website more difficult to find. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) can help. SEO is a technique used by many internet marketers to rank higher in search engines. SEO can significantly increase traffic to your website which in turn increases customers and sales.

If you want your website to rank higher on search engines, there are many factors to consider.

1. Right keywords: If you are looking for a particular item, you begin by entering specific words or phrases into a search box. The search results display websites that match the words you entered.  While it is difficult to rank high for broad term words like “insurance” it is much easier to rank for long tail keywords such as “life insurance in Santa Cruz”. There are many keywords tools available on the internet that can help you focus in on keywords that attract a significant amount of traffic yet with low competition. You should tweak and fine tune your list of keywords until your final list includes as little as 5 or as many as 100 keywords.

2. Website Name: Using keywords as a guide, give your website a name that is relevant to what you offer. If the focus of your website is how to lose weight, search for keywords that have high traffic and low competition that are relevant with weight loss. Select 5 or 6 weight loss keyword choices to see if the exact keyword phrase is available as a domain name (.com, .net and .org are the most popular). If the exact domain is not available try adding a word to the beginning or end of the long tail keyword phrase. For example, if “how to lose weight” is not available, look to see if “how to lose weight now” or “how to lose weight quickly” is available.

3. Meta tags: With your list of keywords in hand, populate your article or blog with 2 to 5 keywords. The key is the sentences have to make sense and be relevant. Become familiar with header tags (h1, h2, h3) as search engines look for keywords in these areas. Your title (the sentence that displays in blue at the top of the website) should contain a primary keyword (as should your domain name) followed by using 2 to 5 secondary keywords in the Meta description and the tags. The title, description and tags are what display in search engine results and these fields are limited to a specific number of characters.

4. Outbound links to authority sites: Page Rank (PR) is a number that Google assigns every website. The higher the number, from 0 to 10, the more authority a site has. Newly created websites are often ranked zero (0) while Google is ranked at 10. One aspect of your website’s ranking is based on the number of website pages, their content relevance and usefulness. Add outbound links using words within your article or blog to a relevant authority site to. For example, on a blog post on the topic of cherry tomatoes, create an outbound hyperlink to Burpee (a PR 5 site).

5. Inbound links: This type of link is also known as back links because these are links that lead back to your website. Ideally, content from an authority site (including .edu and .gov sites) would be linked back to your website eventually bumping your site up in the rankings. One way to build back links is to publish an article in an article directory like Ezine Articles that includes an author profile with links back to your site. Other ways to create back links include press releases, leaving comments on others’ blogs, and integrating social news sites like Reddit and Digg.

6. Integrate social media branding: Build your brand with a Facebook Fan Page and Twitter site. Don’t forget to include your Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn and other relevant social media sites. Add social media icons to your site to make it easy for visitors to like or share your content. Marketing experts claim it takes at least seven times communicating with potential customers before they trust and eventually buy from you. Social media is one way to build that trust.

7. Create a Sitemap: Think of a sitemap as a table of contents for Google. By creating a sitemap of your website, it allows Google and other search engines and spiders to crawl your site to determine its content and what to include in search results.

SEO takes time to build over time but the end result is worth the time and effort.