If you’ve got your own business or blog, chances are you’ve heard of SEO. The term can seem daunting, especially when coupled with things like algorithms and coding. While there’s seemingly an infinite amount to learn about SEO, implementing a few basic strategies can make a significant impact on your web traffic.
These simplified and actionable tips will help you understand the basics of SEO and how to apply them to your website and content.
Contents
1. Track Your Data
The best way to begin to understand SEO and how it works for your website is by tracking your analytics. The most popular and comprehensive software is Google Analytics. By watching your metrics, you can see tons of valuable and useful information about your website traffic.
With this software, you’ll be able to see how many people are viewing your pages, what content they engage with, and most importantly, how they found you in the first place. Google Analytics is a whole other platform to learn, but even the basic functions are incredibly helpful. You can use the information to optimize your content and marketing based on your user engagement.
2. Link Building & Blogger Outreach
The more external sites that link to your content, the higher it will rank in search results. Every time someone clicks on a link to your website, Google will count it as a vote. The more reputable the origin webpage is, the more valuable Google will deem your site. So how do you get quality sites to include your links? Through blogger outreach.
Blogger outreach will allow you to connect with bloggers and reputable publications and have them push your links within their content. It can be tough to establish these relationships in the beginning, and it is often helpful to enlist the help of an agency who have already established connections.
3. Keyword Research
The concept of SEO centers around the use of keywords. These are the terms that your target audience will search for. Choosing relevant and popular keywords to include in your content will allow your ideal client to find you easily through a search.
Think of some words that you’d use to describe your product or service. Then run them through a keyword research tool to assess their quality. You want to look for keywords that have a high volume of search, but low competition rating. That means not many sites are using these keywords, but a lot of people are searching for them.
4. Optimize Your Content
Once you’ve chosen your keywords, it’s time to create your content. You’ll want to include the keywords as many times as possible, without it sounding awkward. Keep the content flow natural, but aim to include your keyword in the following areas:
- Titles
- Meta-descriptions
- URLs
- Once under each sub-heading
- In image alt descriptions
While you can use SEO to rank your written content, it will do better if you implement various types of media. Consider recording some video content, which is 50 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google search. Add animations or infographics that provide value into your content as well. Elements like this will make your content more engaging and encourage your visitors to share it with their network.
SEO can be a complicated subject, but by using these basic tips, you can begin to see the benefits of implementing it into your content strategy.
