My first couple of blogs talked about how to build a website on the cheap and why it’s important to have that digital presence, in addition to any social media accounts.
If your business has a digital presence, then SEO is foundational!
I know, I know, I already hear the groans, as someone who knows. We’ve all experienced it. You walk into a room of people from an industry that you’re not intimately familiar with and it’s like they’re talking a whole different language! Acronyms fly back and forth, while everyone has the look of expectation, waiting for you to chime in like you should somehow automatically know and understand what they’re talking about.
Marketing is no different. So let’s cut to the quick … Search Engine Optimization, aka SEO. In this case, it really is worth cracking the nut on this one, as it’s pretty foundational to your success across most digital platforms.
So here’s how it works in layman’s terms.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
You may have heard the popular expression, “Content is King”. And right beside that King, stands its Queen, SEO.
SEO is basically how search engines read and interpret your digital content to decide and rank its relevance to audiences. Let’s take Google for example. Let us first admit that no one really 100% knows their “secret sauce” of how to rank first in organic search – i.e. the content that appears on searches that aren’t “Sponsored” or paid for. But what we do know is that the higher your website ranks on organic search, the closer it comes to the top of customers’ searches, and is therefore more likely to get the majority of customer traffic.
But marketers do have a pretty good idea.
Let’s say you’re building a website to advertise your faith-based apparel, like one of the clients I’ve worked with in the past. Google knows and understands that you’re a supplier of faith-based clothing because you tell it by your use of keywords, i.e. the words that audiences are likely to be searching for when they’re looking for the types of products you sell, like “faith-based t-shirt”, “”christian apparel”, “in god we trust sweater” for example. (And yes, “keywords” can be single words or phrases).
SEO also applies to other elements of your web pages, such as how you describe the images on your website (i.e. the image alt text) and the titles of each of your web pages (i.e. H1 text).
So let’s dive in …
Five Easy SEO Best Practices to Start Improving Your Website Ranking (or, more importantly to entrepreneurs, the visibility of your business)
Here are five solid options to explore:
- We’ve already mentioned the need for good quality content on your website. And that includes the use of keywords. Having said that, avoid overusing keywords to the point where your content reads awkwardly. Search engines are more intuitive than that and are quick to recognize the practice of “keyword stuffing”
- Use keyword-rich Title tags (the blue headlines that audiences click on after they do a search). These define a page’s topic and will heavily impact your SEO rankings. To optimize your Title tags, keep them between 50-60 characters long. (You should also give consideration to your Meta descriptions which are the short summaries below the Title which briefly describe the content of your web page, although they more heavily influence whether audiences will click through to your page, rather than directly impacting your SEO
- The H1 tag is the main, visible title of the webpage and tells a user (and search engines) what your web page is about. This is also a key element of SEO and needs to be content-specific in terms of what appears on that webpage, and keyword rich too
- The URL too (i.e. the direct links to your webpages) should be descriptive and is another opportunity to include keywords to help boost your SEO. For example, the URL to my blog discussing whether entrepreneurs need a website features the words “/do-you-need-a-website/
- In my experience, one of the least known SEO best practices seems to be linking between the pages of your own website. Multiple pages referencing the content that users are searching for indicates to search engines that there is more than one singular page with limited references to what your audiences are searching for. Instead, there are multiple pages referencing that content indicating that your website is indeed relevant. This helps to improve your SEO
All of these tips are considered “On-page SEO”, and there are additional best practices that you can implement to further boost your website ranking on search.
The good news? All the tips listed here are doable, whether by the person who builds and manages your website for you, or if you do it yourself. Website-building platforms are typically explicit about asking you to input all of these various elements in order to optimize your website build.
Simply follow these tips and you’re already off to a great start in inching up the (organic) rankings on search engines to increase the visibility of your website and your business.
What You Can Expect Here
I will be using this as an extension of my initial Marketing Agency offering – a platform for disseminating marketing tips, free and low cost marketing best practices that any individual or organization can use to help promote their businesses, their products, and their services.
Interested? Watch this space for more.
Marketing That Matters 