What’s the big fuss about search engine optimization and why is it so important? Let’s say that you are just an optimistic and motivated person who is starting his own business. You don’t know much about SEO, you only know that it stands for search engine optimization. But you know it is important for getting more traffic to your website, and more traffic means more potential customers. In this simple guide we will try to explain in the simplest what is search engine optimization and how can you use it to your advantage.
Let’s start explaining what SEO is – it’s a set of rules and tips that you can apply to your website to get better results on search engine ranking page. When it comes to digital marketing, this step in improving your website is extremely important. Technology is advancing further in every passing moment, and the Internet has become the universal tool for advertising your business. There is an incredible amount of website that offer SEO services, social media marketing services and even local SEO services. The reason for so many websites like these is that SEO is extremely important nowadays, you can picture as a global commercial for your business that is one click away from the whole world to see.
Here are the basic problems that occur when you are trying to deal with SEO of your website. Most of these problems we can categorize in few bigger groups, first of them being basic SEO issues.
When we say basic SEO issues, we are talking about the things that can be easily fixed, if you know what problems you are looking for. The most common one is duplicate content on your website.
Duplicate content
The most common problem that occurs with many of the websites is that they suffer from lower rankings on Google search page, because of the duplicate content. You shouldn’t be running your website with the philosophy that any content is a good content. When it comes to the SEO marketing and SEO checking of your website, duplicate content is one of the most poisonous things to your website’s health. You should try to remove all of the duplicate content on your website, no matter if it was done on purpose or accidentally. To put it in the simple terms, it doesn’t matter if you have one or one hundred articles promoting the same keyword – Google will only show one of these pages on the search ranking page, and the worst thing that can happen here is that Google doesn’t show the page that is bringing the most traffic to your website.
Problem with your website’s URLs
Most of the website owners overlook the problems that might occur with the wrong formulation of URLs on your website. If your goal is to improve your website’s search engine marketing, you should take your time and adjust the URLs on your website properly. The first and the most important thing that your URLs should do, is to give enough information to the visitors about the particular web page. You should try to avoid URLs such as www.yourwebsite.com/article1.php&id=54236345345. This can be very confusing to your readers, it is not convenient to use URLs like this when you are doing internet marketing of your business, and most importantly – it doesn’t give any necessary information to your potential customer. A good example of a well-structured URL can be something like: www.yourwebsite.com/article1.html. The URL is short, has enough important information to the reader and can be easily shared on social network platforms and it will do wonder to your SEO marketing. The short URLs are always more search engine friendly, meaning that they will rank higher on Google search results page, compared to the long and unstructured URLs.
Title tags and meta tags
These two terms are referring to your on-site optimization process. You should try and utilize both of these tags to their full potential. Every single page on your website should have independently customizable title tag. If your website has this structure, you can easily change the title tag for any particular page and adjust it to reflect the content of the web page. The title tags can do amazing things for your business SEO or even your local business SEO.
When it comes to the meta tags, we can say that they are a bit weaker than the title tags, when it comes to your website’s SEO. But that isn’t the reason to overlook meta tags completely, they can be used to provide the search engines important marketing text for the snippet that will be displayed on the search engine result page.
One more piece of advice, when it comes to the basic issues with your website’s SEO, is that you should make sure your website has the proper architecture that works flawlessly. The problem that occurs here is that search engines can’t index all of the pages correctly if your website doesn’t have a good architecture. This problem can’t be fixed with content optimization, it’s a structural problem that needs to be addressed, meaning you have to fix the logical structure of your website. Having an actual sitemap can be really helpful and it can help you get one step close to having a SEO site.
Keyword research
Now that we have fixed all of the basic SEO issues, it’s time to talk about the keywords on your website. A lot of people don’t pay enough attention to the keywords they are using on their website. If they are selling jewelry, they will just use few simple keywords that are tightly connected to their products. This isn’t so simple, and you should take your time and research the keywords you are using on your website. Here are the steps you can take when it comes to the keyword optimization on your website:
· Start with the most popular ones. This step is fairly easy to do, since there are a lot of software online that can help you out in finding the most popular keywords that are being used in your type of business. Try to find at least 100 keywords that are being widely used in searching for your type of business. One of the best tools that you can use to help you out with your research is Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
· Improve your focus on the specific keywords. In this step you should focus on your website’s niche, if you are selling a specific product, try finding the keywords that describe that particular product perfectly. If you are able to find the perfect keywords that best describe the products you are selling on your website, the customer can find it with one simple search on Google. Your SEO keywords should be just a short description of your main products.
· Don’t focus too much on the search volume. It is a fact that the higher search volume of a particular keyword, the more people are searching for it. But that’s only one half of the whole story, if you are focusing only on the keywords that have high search volume, you could be missing out on the keywords that actually close the deal. The higher the search volume of the keyword is – the higher the competition on the search result pages. It’s a smarter strategy to have a specific niche keyword that has 100 organic search volume, than a global keyword that has 10000 organic search volume.
· Don’t overdo it. When you have finished the elimination process for the group of the keywords you have chosen, you should have around 40 keywords that you will actually use. This is a reasonable number of keywords that you should use on your website for your business niche. This won’t just help you in better utilizing your website’s resources, this will also build a solid foundation for your long-term success that you can improve on in the future.
· Try to mix it up. When considering which of the keywords to choose (low, mid or high competition ones), try to focus some of the keywords on each group. You shouldn’t completely ignore the keywords that are highly competitive in the search engines, but they shouldn’t be your main focus either. The ideal proportions should look something like 20%-40%-40%, for the each of the keyword’s groups. The most important thing here is not to get distracted by large search numbers, that’s not the main thing that will bring the best results for your website.
These are just a few simple tips and tricks on how to get started with your website SEO. The purpose of this article is to introduce you to the world of the SEO, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more things that you need to learn in order to boost your website’s ranking on search engine result pages, as much as possible. It is not rocket science, but neither is it simple as everyone thinks, it demands time and learning new things – you have to be ready to invest yourself in it completely. The results this process will bring to you is a transformation of your business, from a small business for family and friends, to the business that can be recognized worldwide, with just one simple web search.