Implement SEO to Grow Your Business
In the modern digital age, an online presence is essential for business owners and entrepreneurs. The internet is how we communicate, where we shop, find services, and search for jobs. The possibilities and opportunities are endless. But how can you best get your business or product seen among the trillions of websites, ads, and blog pages out there? It can be overwhelming. There are millions of people online at any given time, just within the United States alone. Approximately 15% of those millions use a search engine every day, while 45% query at least once per week, and 68% query per month. That’s a lot of traffic that could potentially be directed to your website, if they knew how to find it. You just have to make it easier for them.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a process by which you can improve the visibility of your website in search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo. By communicating with search engines in a language they understand (SEO), using keywords and html tags, your site will become easier to find, therefore improving your traffic and sales.
Professional Website Design
Nearly every professional will tell you that they key to good SEO optimization is to build it into the foundation of your website design. Adding it in after the fact isn’t nearly as powerful as building your site from the ground up with html tags, keywords, and content all geared towards SEO optimization. Whether you do it yourself or hire a professional, research will be key to understanding how to best design your website for the best results.
Creating Content
After you have your website design, you need content, such as blogs, articles, photos, galleries, or an online store. This can be the most time consuming step, but also the most necessary. People go to websites for the content. If there is nothing to look at, to entertain or engage your audience or potential customers, then they have no reason to stay. The more content you have, the more likely customers will browse your site for longer than a few seconds. Quality content will lead to organic sharing by your users. Also, it gives search engines more pages to include in potential searches, which could drastically increase traffic.
But still, content doesn’t matter if your customers won’t see it.
Understanding Keywords
Keywords are the words or phrases within the content of your site that a customer can use to find you. Choosing the right keywords is, forgive the pun, key. You should choose the words or phrases that people might type into a search engine if they were looking for a product or service such as yours. For instance, if someone was searching for website design, they might type into google: professional website designer in Phoenix area. So, if you were a website designer in Phoenix, then having these words within your content, in more than one place, would increase the chance that your website would show up in Google results for a similar search.
SEO Tags
SEO tags, such as title tags, header tags, meta description tags, and image alt tags, tell search engines what’s on your site. If a search engine is going to rank your website, it first needs to know what it’s about, what’s on each page, and what content you have. Tags tell search engines this information, in a language they understand. Tags also go hand in hand with keywords. You should have you key words or phrases within your title tags and meta description tags to boost ranking and optimization.
These are just the basics of SEO. There is much more to it; you could spend a lifetime trying to figure everything out. The game is forever changing as new technologies and strategies are developed constantly. But however difficult it may seem, staying up to date with the latest changes is key to building a successful business and presence online.
