How To Improve Your SEO (and why you need to)

 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important things to consider when building an online marketing strategy. The challenge lies in maintaining relevance in the eyes of search engines, and as Google is by far the largest and most influential search engine (with over 1 billion hits per month) one of the most important aims of your online marketing strategy has to be to dominate Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Without implementing solid SEO strategies you’re website will be about as useful as a shop with no windows and no sign. You want, or should I say need, people to find you online and with a few simple strategies you can.

So here are some ways to improve your website’s SEO strength.

Firstly, you need to think about your URL with regard to two things: Format and Content. Now I’m going to assume you know not to use spaces in your URL but what is quite a common mistake is putting in an underscore to separate words.  Due to the algorithms embedded in a search engine like Google, this will cause it to identify the URL as one big word and therefore will reduce your chance of people finding you in a keyword search. However, what you can do is use dashes – problem solved. The content of your URL is also crucial. If you include what are known as “stop words” such as “the”, “what” or “it” the chances are most search engines will actually ignore them and therefore weaken you’re SEO. So take a look at your URL(s), make sure they are formatted correctly and remove stop words.

Another classic (and essential) trick to improve your SEO ranking is by identifying and utilizing keywords. By using keyword rich title tags on each page of your website you can give yourself the best chance of dominating SERPs and therefore maximize potential income. It’s important to take <title> tags (found in the title bar of the browser) into consideration as search engines use them to ascertain what type of content appears on the page. If you enter keywords into your <title> tag instead of your company name it will prove advantageous for your SEO ranking. Be careful not to exceed the 60 character limit though, as it would be cut-off.

To track the progress of your site rankings you can use an analytics program, the largest being Google Analytics. Using the different tools involved you will be able to track which keywords, search engines and traffic sources are proving most beneficial in terms of bringing in business. This information is invaluable when it comes to identifying how to improve your SEO ranking.

It can also be very beneficial to add a blog to your site. If you regularly update your blogs with new posts and fresh content you can drive traffic to your site through an improved SEO ranking. This is because search engines love fresh content. So, updating regularly can give your site’s SEO a massive advantage. Blogs can also be a great way of interacting with customers, and potential customers, which not only helps you in a marketing context but also increases the value in an SEO context. Now more than ever “the fresher the better” applies to your website and its SEO ranking, as Google have recently announced a change to its search algorithm. So keep it fresh!

So there are some simple SEO tips to get started with.  And if that wasn’t enough, it’s now becoming more and more apparent that you need to stay up to date with potential future trends so you can adapt, and maintain and improve,your SEO ranking. With the buzz around Google+ being “the next big thing” for business the result is sure to affect SEO in a big way. I won’t go into too much detail or attempt to predict the future but it seems that the “+1” feature is likely to become particularly important when developing an SEO strategy. Companies will have to adapt their strategy to optimize for recommendations to stay ahead of competitors.

Searching is becoming social, make sure you stay ahead of the curve.

Posted by tmiparis on November 24, 2011

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