SEO – or search engine optimisation – is essential for any business, start-up or established. Sitting at the bottom of Google is no good to any business, so follow the tips below to optimise your search engine rankings and get your business noticed.
1) Be Consistent
One of the most important steps in SEO is being consistent – making sure that everything you put out about your website across the web, including links to and from your website, networking pages, guest blogs, and all of the information on the website itself is consistent. This enables the search engines to pick up data about your website, and if it all matches, the search engines can see that your site can be trusted. Equally, consistency is key for getting your brand message out there. People need to know what your brand or website offers, and they need to know about your brand message – so put it out there!
2) Be Descriptive
Descriptive titles and descriptive links will not only tell the search engines what you offer, but they’ll also attract the people that are searching for exactly what you offer. As an example, if you’re a graphic artist based in California, describe your page as “Graphic Artist in California” – Google will pick up on it, and the people that are searching for graphic artists in California will get directed to your site. It might not be interesting, but it will improve your SEO rankings – and that’s what you need.
3) Use Google!
Before you can start to think about the keywords that you want to rank for – meaning, when people search for a keyword or phrase in a search engine, whether or not you rank for that keyword search – you need to see how popular or how unpopular the keyword is. Use the Google Adwords Keyword tool to search for keywords that might relate to what you want to rank for, and to brainstorm for keywords that you might not have thought about. Use them throughout your website in a natural way and use them in titles, blog categories, blog posts and guest posts – and pretty much anywhere else that you can think of. But keep it natural! Be careful of trying to rank for an extremely generic keyword, however, as this will be very difficult – for example, “artist” is a generic keyword, whereas “graphic artist”, “line artist”, “graphic art” and “line art” have less search volume – meaning that they are easier to rank for in a shorter period.
4) Have a Clean, Organised Website
Organised, clean, non-fussy websites that are well-designed, well-organised and well-thought out will be much more likely to rank higher in Google than an overly fussy, poorly designed website that focuses on design gimmicks rather than on quality. Think about building your site on a platform such as WordPress – it creates a simple, organised and clean website, and it also comes with a number of SEO plugins that you can utilise that will boost your SEO rankings without you having to do anything.
5) Get Help
If you’re completely new to the web and you are struggling to get results, or if you’re unsure of what to do next, it might be a good idea to get help from a reputable SEO agency, such as Digivate.
Agencies such as this one will be able to improve your rankings and keep them stable.