These days, SEO is all about getting as many people as possible to find your website through major search engines, such as Google or Bing. Many factors determine a website’s search ranking. Web content is one. SEO involves ensuring that all text is relevant, from titles and photo captions to main content.
Your site’s ranking also depends on its performance, which is affected by its ease of navigation, page loading time, and bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave a page immediately on landing, without viewing other pages). Finally, if others see your site as a credible source of information, and links from other websites drive traffic to yours, your ranking goes up.
Use Google Analytics to help you determine who your website visitors are, how they get to your site, and what they read.
Relevance, rather than quantity, of information makes your target audience read your content. Learn what keywords drive them to your site and ensure these appear prominently in your material.
Add a blog or latest news page to showcase updated content. Ensure as much of this as possible is new, not copied from elsewhere.
When using pictures, ensure you have keywords both in the caption and the ‘alt tag’ function.
Work with others to develop links to your site. For instance, write an article for another website, comment on someone else’s article, get a directory listing.
Learn the buzzwords that get your audience chatting and then pepper them throughout your website. Be as specific as possible.
Tell people about your site. Have buttons that link to your social platforms.
To really get the most out of your marketing strategy, you also need to build your virtual presence. You need to be able to shout about your achievements, or better still, get someone else to shout about them. Consider which social media channels are right for you, and make it easy for people to find your website through them. If you’re creating content for people to share, make sure you include your web address so that customers can find their way back to your page.
SEO isn’t a static process. Neither is it a tick-the-box exercise. It’s a cyclical process. You may find that you are constantly tweaking and changing your website to achieve this, but that doesn’t mean you are constantly getting it wrong. It means you are persistently striving to get it right.