You have put a lot of effort into creating your Web or ecommerce site and your expectations have been high but the final result is pretty poor. It seems like your page is invisible to a potential customer. Well, don’t fall into despair. Creating an attractive content using basic search engine optimization (SEO) will help you to make your page visible to visitors and rank it at high position of the search engine results.
Even this process sounds complicated, it could be accomplished following some simple rules and advices but first of all, keep in mind that your content have to be relevant to what the user is looking for, your site have to work properly and be easy to navigate and possibly linked to other authoritative sites.
Nowadays, getting to the top of Google, Yahoo!, Bing… has become a challenge, so you should always have SEO as your primary task. According to SEO Los Angeles, 80% of the internet users prefer Google as a #1 search tool. You should stay on the game with copywriting creating informative, fresh, top class text in a timely manner. These steps might help you:
Research Keywords
Finding out how people are seeking for sites such as yours – what words they use, what questions they ask so you can provide them with the proper answers.
When it comes to researching keywords first of all you should come up with a set of keywords that describe your content, products and services in the best way and which potential visitors would probably use to find sites similar to yours.
You can also use a keyword research tools to analyze your list in order to determine the most relevant and highly demand ones. Google Keyword Planner and WordTracker are some of the tools that can be used for keyword research and those are free. Users must have an AdWords account in order to use it. It shows every month searches on Google, competition, average click cost and others.
SEMrush is tool that will show you those keywords that rank your competitors in search results. You can also use Bing Webmaster to enter your chosen keywords to get back keywords related to your search. Using Soovle you can find the most typed in keywords. You can use it on various search engines by just entering the keyword root.
To find proper keywords you should also analyze competition keywords. It can be done by searching topic similar to yours and analyze pages placed on the first page of Google.
It’s important to take care about how many keywords should be in your post or page. Google has limited the number of keywords to 2-4% of the content on the page, but this could change any time.
Write Great Content
Your blogs, news articles and other content should be written for people primarily. If those are useful and engaging, people will share your work on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc. providing you with extra traffic. Search engines will recognize the quality.
- Word count is important
Make sure that your content is at least 250 words long. Longer SEO content may include more keywords plus you should have plenty to say about the topic you have chosen in order to grab a visitor’s attention.
- Don’t duplicate content
In order to win some more visitors you should publish a unique content, different from other pages on your site, as well from external sites. Also you should bear in mind that Google do not approve duplicate content. If your site contains some duplicate content it could be banned from search results.
- Use Catchy Headlines
You have to grab reader’s attention in a just a few seconds and the best way to do it is to make a catchy headline.
- Take care about image attributes
Make sure that images you use have details like title, caption, description. There are lot of people who are looking for some content using Google image search, so make your image highly visible and attract potential customers to visit your page.
- Inform, don’t sell.
Instead of desperately trying to sell your product or service try to write informative content and present it in a winsome way to make your potential customer to choose you.
It is important to know that too many keywords won’t help you. In the past two years internet marketing has changed thanks to the release of Google’s Panda Update. This is a search filter that will prevent poor quality content to get into Google’s top search results. So work on your quality rather than quantity.
The original Panda update was released in February 2011, and most recent update is Panda 4.1. released in September 2014. The company has a history of rolling out minor updates, sometimes as frequently as monthly.
You can check on Google advisory updates on its blog so you can find out more about how to improve the content and design. This will help you to avoid being lowered, or penalized when it comes to search engine results.
Another part of SEO is link building which will help you to make a link to your site appear on other sites. Some techniques may help you:
1. Guest posting – create an article that will be published on some other personal or business website to achieve a new audience.
2. Make an infographic – create an interesting, appealing data infographic which will be shared from person to person.
3. Build links over email – email potential linking websites and request that your link be placed on a relevant page of content.
4. Build links with social media – this is one of the best ways to promote your own site since millions of people use social media daily.
5. Analyze competitor links – this way you can get some ideas for potential sources that could be linked back to your site. This can be done using simple tools. Some good tools for backlinking analyses are:
Ahrefs – on the free account you will get a lot of backlink based data with ability to see the top 10 backlinks per URL.
Open Site Explorer – using free account you get a list of 50 backlinks for each URL.
SEO Spyglass – the free version will check if the links are live, display anchor text, social shares and page rank scores.
In order to improve your link building you can also use paid directories for link building that will provide you with fast inclusion. Some of these directories are:
- Yahoo! Directory
Submitting to this directory will cost $299 for a year. This directory will help you manage your listings online, request changes to your listings, update billing info, view invoices and more.
- Best of the Web
You will have to pay $69.96 a year for this directory or $249.95 one-time fee. It offers 100,000 categories to pick from. But before your site is approved it has to pass through the strict criteria.
- Business.com
The yearly cost for submitting this site is $299 an it takes less than 5 minutes. Your site will be approved within a few days.
- The Directory Journal
This directory gives you access to hundreds of thousands of visitors each month. It costs $59.95 per year.
- Aviva directory
This site will provide you with human edited directory of the best websites, where users can find quickly what they are looking for. You have to pay $49.95 per year.