A major challenge for any business today is to make sure that when a potential customer or client is looking for the products or services that you provide, that they do not end up ultimately finding a competitor. When it comes to organic traffic, SEO is the way to increase the number of visitors to your site.
The primary way in which that would ever happen is online. If your competitor has mastered search engine optimization – or SEO for short – better than you and your team has, chances are good they will reap the benefits of ranking higher on valuable search engine result pages – or SEPRS.
Ranking higher on SERPS is an important way that potential consumers interact with companies.
Sometimes, when people think of SEO they think of mindless keyword stuffing or pay-per-click advertising, but the real meat of SEO is quite different from that. There is plenty that you can do to vastly increase you SEO that comes at no cost to you.
Here are the best things you can do staring right now:
Optimize your on-site content for human readers, not search engine algorithms.
Thankfully, as the years have gone on, Google and other major search engines have put a huge emphasis on the actual quality of content. Back in the day, content was secondary to keywords, but now the opposite is true.
By making sure that the content on you site is educational, engaging, and the highest quality possible will naturally improve your SEO, and that content is of the right blog post length.
When you are writing, ask yourself what you think your customers may want to read. Then, write that!
Post content regularly.
The term blogging is a fairly wide-reaching one, but at its core is essentially means content being put on a site for people to read.
Blogging consistently is a fantastic way to easily increase your organic site traffic. Blogging consistently allows you to not only build out your site and make it more interesting and informational for visitors, it also allows you to go more in depth about interesting aspects of your market and niche.
Get involved in the blogosphere.
It certainly helps to post great content on your own site, but what about interacting with other people’s contents as well? Reaching out to other blogs and individuals on larger sites and message boards is a great way to drum up awareness and interaction with your site.
Read, comment, and link to other people’s sites and blogs – specifically great ones in your niche and market – to encourage them to do the same for your site. It can be an incredibly symbiotic relationship where both parties win!
Improve your meta data.
Whenever you post something new on your site, it comes with a meta title, URL, description, and image to help make it as attractive to readers as possible. These factors are known as on-page SEO factors and it is actually quite important that you do some research to make sure that you are getting this stuff right. It’s really easy once you get the hang of it and many publishers such as WordPress and HubSpot will quite literally hold your hand throughout the process.
Just make sure that you are not writing and publishing, hoping that that is all you need to do. Make the title catchy and enticing. Keep the URL short. Make sure the meta description is error free and informative. All of this kind of work will pay dividends not only on the page you are publishing, but your site overall.
Encourage and seek out incoming links.
Google looks at a ton of different factors when it is deciding which sites and pages it has rank high on its SERPs, and one of the major deciding factors is incoming links. If a site has a ton of incoming links from trustworthy sites with high organic traffic numbers and strong domain authority, that site is going to get the benefit of ranking much higher on valuable keywords.
Because of that, it is certainly within your benefit to encourage clients, friends, family members, partners, colleagues, suppliers, and other sites within your industry to link to your site.
Quite simply, the more incoming links you have, the higher your site will rank. Incoming links are seen as other people and companies vouching for your site.
You can also look to build links through guest posting.
This is not as simple as just getting some low-reputation site to link to yours. You want to find highly reputable sites that are within your niche to link to your sites. If you find a site that you love, don’t hesitate to reach out and see if they are open to guest posting. Some may never respond to you, and that’s okay! Others will be happy to post content that you write on their site. Just remember to take as much care with that content as you do with the high-quality content that you write on your own site.
Use social media.
So as of now, Google does not technically consider social media to be a deciding factor when it comes to SEO, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a huge impact when it comes to the organic traffic that ends up on your site.
And just to be clear: Organic traffic absolutely plays an important role when it comes to your SEO.
So think about it, even if your site is just starting out, if you can build a strong following on a site like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube, you are building a potential readership for your blog! All you have to do is include the link to your site in your bio, in posts, and more, and you will start to reap the benefits almost immediately.
You can also use social media to work as a “human” arm of your site. Log on regularly and friend or follow people who like or watch your posts. Comment on the pages of the major players in your niche, and make sure to announce any new roll-outs that may be available or on the horizon.
Hopefully these tips have helped you better understand what you can do and should do when it comes to SEO. Good luck!
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