Search engine optimization can have a dramatic effect on the success of any business regardless of its size. SEO best-practices are always changing, however, because Google frequently modifies its algorithms—so much so, in fact, that approaches which were effective in obtaining a page one ranking just a couple of years ago may even be counter-productive today.
The evolving nature of search requires a fresh strategy when it comes to keep your business prominent in search engine listings.
In this post I’m going to highlight seven tips for successful SEO:
1. Develop your strategy—a carefully-crafted marketing strategy is vital in identifying your target market segments, how best to communicate with them, what types of messages and content you want to evangelize, metrics that can help determine and how problems when content doesn’t perform as expected and so on. It’s an ever-evolving plan, but an initial strategy needs to be formulated before it can grow into itself.
2. Identify target keywords—all SEO projects begin with research into target keywords. Your goal here is to determine the keywords that have the most return with the least competition, and this is based on your target segments and an in-depth analysis of current and recent search trends. Build compelling content around these keywords—Google is adept at determining how relevant and informative content is to specific keywords.
3. Keep content pithy—if you’re focusing on a particular topic in your segment(s), then strive to write about everything relevant to that topic. Creating pithy content is how you attract new users and make sure that your site doesn’t stagnate. These also feed into the idea of generating good backlinks to go with good content. Together these things are very helpful for a site’s final page rank.
4. Build relevant links—modern day link building requires proper understanding of how anchor tags work and how you can best utilize them to increase your search engine rank. Link relevancy is key in figuring out which sites are best linked to. Tools such as Mozbar allow you to quickly ascertain if a link is good by glancing at the DA score. This is important because these links affect how relevant a site you are to your niche.
5. Determine social channels—there are hundreds of millions of users across dozens of social networking channels and as a startup, and your time dedicated to social media is already at a premium. Understanding that you can’t cover all the possible avenues is the first thing to come to grips with. Some background research can then direct you to the social media network where the majority of your target demographic dwells, allowing you to focus on that one.
6. Be mobile-friendly—it isn’t necessary to completely re-build a website in order to make it mobile-friendly. There are plenty of resources online that can convert a website to mobile-friendly standards, without a great deal to time or money. Even if budget is your concern, you have far more to lose from a site that isn’t mobile compatible than you save from not making it mobile compatible.
7. Befriend analytics—the numbers don’t lie and the relevant numbers to you are the ones that tell of your page’s successes and failures. While successes are important to celebrate, failures allow you to improve your site. Analytics gives you goals to aim for and are a pretty good guide as to how effective your marketing strategy has been thus far and what could be improved in the future.
These seven tips should get you started on the journey to a position on page one of a search engine listing. SEO is a huge and complex topic, so strive to increase your knowledge as much as possible—subscribe to relevant blogs (there are some very good ones) and consider taking an evening class at a local college if time allows. Spending time in acquiring more and more knowledge will be a worthwhile investment for your business.
Thanks for reading.
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