Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an ever-changing aspect of the digital marketing world. With so many verticals to analyze, such as, keyword stuffing, meta data, and quickly-updated algorithms, what is the best way to ensure the success of your website? These six simple steps outline the most important ways to boost your web traffic rankings and, ultimately, gain more customers.
- Define your target audience
- Use a keyword planner
- Avoid keyword density
- Know the components of search engines
- Optimize meta descriptions
- Mimic the top 10 websites in the world
- As you start your adventure into the world of SEO, it is important to define the audience that you are trying to reach. So, what is a target audience? It’s the demographic of people to which you want your product or service to be influential to the most. Whether it is teen males, elderly people, or middle aged-women, you should research what kind of things it is that they are interested in seeing. What is competition marketing towards them? What messages do they want to receive from companies? Identifying these important questions will help you take the first step to improving your search engine rankings.
- Keyword planners are the next step to providing quality and targeted content to your key demographic. A good SEO strategy revolves around keywords. There are many free keyword tools for SEO that will help you identify the words that are being searched for the most, have the least competition, and will boost the rankings of your site. Identifying 10-20 keywords per content post will help search engines recognize the validity of your site.
- With identifying and utilizing keywords comes avoiding keyword stuffing. Search engine algorithms have been advancing over the years to ensure that keyword spam does not get rewarded and is actually penalized. Using each keyword only once or twice throughout a content piece will keep algorithms happy and your rankings high.
- SEO best practices come by knowing the search engine that you are attempting to rank on. Google has an algorithm that is ever-changing and fast-paced. Keeping up on popular SEO blogs is a great way to stay up to date on the newest information about search engines and the best-practices that are being used by professionals in the digital marketing world.
- SEO content is both on page and behind the scenes. Meta data is a huge part of the unseen optimization that should be analyzed for high rankings. One of the most important things to do is have and optimize a meta description for each page of your site. Located in the HTML code, a meta description should contain a main keyword and an action item for users to follow, getting higher recognition from search engines and a piqued interest from potential customers.
- Still not sure why you’re not ranking? Check out some of the highest ranking websites in the world and mimic their content. SEO is a result of trial and error to rank your website. What are these websites doing that make them stand out? What keywords are they using? What does their HTML code look like? By examining top competitors and implementing their strategies into your own website, you, too, can be successful.
SEO is a powerful skill to use in the traffic you are receiving to your site. By following these six steps, you can become more well-versed in the digital marketing world and give your website the boost it needs to gain traffic, customers, and sales.
By Allison Brown