I know what’s going through your head, what the heck is SEO, and why do I care? Well SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, and in a nutshell it’s the optimization of your website in order to improve its ranking in search engine results.
Now you’re probably thinking – I already have enough to worry about when it comes to my small business.I spent the time and money to create my website, why do I need to worry about SEO! Well, you need to worry about SEO, because your competitors probably are, and search continues to be the biggest way that users find what they are looking for online. In addition to that, most searches don’t make it past the second page of results so if you’re business is not listed in those first few pages of search results; you’re missing a massive opportunity!
Optimizing your site
The 80/20 rule is one of my favourites and can be applied to almost every facet of your life. This includes the practice of SEO. Spend 80% of your time developing the keywords and keyword phrases that you feel people will use when searching for your products and/or services and 20% of your time making changes and monitoring the results.
Monitoring your progress
If you don’t have any method of monitoring visitors to your site, and how they are finding out about your site, this should be the very first thing you do. There are a ton of web analytics packages out there, but I prefer Google Analytics, it’s easy to use, and provides a great deal of information about your visitors. Once you get a package installed give it at least a month to collect data. During that time, visit your competitors websites and see what they are doing. Their sites will be a great source of information regarding keywords that you should consider introducing on your redesigned page.
Keywords vs. Keyword Phrases
If I have a choice, I would go for phrases over individual keywords every time. Phrases allow you to target specific searches, generally deliver more targeted traffic, and (usually) are easy to rank for.
Where to start?
- Optimize your title tag
- Optimize your page text
- META tags
This has to be one of the most important aspects of your page. Make sure that it applies directly to the content on page.
Work your keyword phrases into the page text (where it makes sense). Make sure that you still write for humans, not search engines.
META tags are not as important as they used to be, but make sure that you have a good description, and keywords.
SEO is a big beast, but with some common sense and a little bit of legwork you can improve your site ranking and drive more traffic to your site.
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